Re: Package's inputs for developer?

[Kaelyn <kaelyn.alexi@protonmail.com>]

Hello,

On Sunday, March 6th, 2022 at 8:19 AM, Olivier Dion via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hi Guix,
>
> I often find my self using inheritance of package to add native-inputs
>
> that are not stricly necessary for building the project, but are used
>
> for developement purpose like so:
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> (define base-native-inputs (list ...))
>
> (define my-package
>
> (package
>
> ...
>
> (native-inputs base-native-inputs)
>
> ...))
>
> ;; Developers version
>
> (package
>
> (inherit my-package)
>
> (native-inputs
>
> (append base-native-inputs
>
> (list gdb lcov))))
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> I guess this is the correct way of doing it or perhaps I should put gdb
>
> and lcov in the base-native-inputs?. But I was thinking that perhaps
>
> something like `(developer-inputs (list gdb lcov))` would be better,
>
> since these inputs are not stricly necessary for building the package.

Can you give a bit more detail about what the use case is for adding developer tools as inputs?

The inheritance you describe seems more cumbersome than simply doing `guix shell gdb lcov -D my-package` to enter a development environment with gdb and lcov present, while also being a bit more limited when there are multiple tools with a similar function. In the above example, imagine if a developer wants to debug my-package using lldb instead of gdb--the developer-inputs would require transforming the package definition, but the ad-hoc invocation could simply be `guix shell lldb lcov -D my-package`.

Cheers,
Kaelyn

>
> Regards,
>
> old
>
> --
>
> Olivier Dion
>
> Polymtl