On Tue, 2021-03-16 at 11:27 +0000, ZmnSCPxj wrote:
> Already working on that, but 0.10.0 will release soon and I doubt my
> changes will make it by then, so Guix might get c-lightning to 0.10.1
> or later if we wait for it.

Awesome!

> Yes, it is true that there is something of a requirement of a strict
> behavior here, I suppose it is possible to use `git-fetch` instead of
> `url-fetch` for our external libraries.

Yes you can use git-fetch, to make sure we are on the same page, are
you speaking of strict behavior requirements like for Bitcoin Core's
consensus code?

> How do I generate `guix hash` for `git-fetch`ed `source`s?

Actually what I do is put a wrong hash in and then copy the "actual
hash" from the error. I havent found another way but this definitely
feels subpar and prevents much verification before putting in the hash,
better suggestions welcome.

> However it also means that every release of C-Lightning I have to go
> double-check what git commit to use for each library (though `jsmn`
> and `libbacktrace` at least seem very stable).
> 
> But it looks to me that unvendoring will require more extensive
> patching of the `Makefile` and an even larger maintenance burden on
> Guix side?

Unvendoring is more or less a policy because we must be able to audit
each piece of software separately for freedom issues (licenses,
violations to the GNU FSDG), and it eases work for security-patching
also.

> `libwally-core` itself depends on another library `libsecp256k1`, so
> I suppose it must transitively be unvendored as well.

Probably, we already have a libsecp256k1 specially for Bitcoin Core.

> The test suite is fairly large and can take a significant amount of
> time to run in full.

That's fine.

> In addition, part of the test includes checks which take advantage of
> `BINTOPKGLIBEXECDIR` relative path we normally use, which I want to
> disable for Guix at least since the relative path only has an
> advantage if the user wants to move the installation after-the-fact
> to a different location (and on Guix the "installation" path cannot
> be moved anyway).
> Using an absolute `BINTOPKGLIBEXECDIR` gives an advantage as
> mentioned in the comments that a profile being upgraded from one
> version of C-Lightning to another does not cause problems for daemons
> currently running off the profile.
> The test can be disabled (but not easily), I suppose.

Problematic or unrealistically expensive tests can be disabled yes.

> Please do, I am not very familiar with any Python infrastructure and
> am primarily a C programmer here, I just barely hack together some
> kind of test in Python.

If you can list the Python dependencies and their version I can look at
packaging them.

> Regards,
> ZmnSCPxj

Léo