Dear Guix,

some time ago I packaged Freexl for Guix

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=623fb4d1629adfa97e3fe412d394ca0490742f29

I would like to write a guile module to wrap Freexl and then use my module
to import data from a bunch of .xls[x] files into a postgresql db

II would like my guile module to be packaged in Guix of course

The problem is that I can't make a proper package of a  guile module
containing also some C code 😕

I took a look at Paroneayea's guile-gcrypt and I don't understand very much
of all that m4 macros kung fu

I think amz3 is having similarly a hard time in packaging his guile based
wrap around the Wiredtiger C API

Just to give you an example, in this excerpt (from guile-gcrypt configure.ac
)

dnl Prepare a version of $datadir that does not contain references to
dnl shell variables.  (Borrowed from Sly, which borrowed from Guix...)
guile_gcrypt_prefix="`eval echo $prefix | sed -e"s|NONE|/usr/local|g"`"
guile_gcrypt_datadir="`eval eval echo $datadir | sed -e
"s|NONE|$guile_gcrypt_prefix|g"`"
AC_SUBST([guile_gcrypt_datadir])

What does "Prepare a version of $datadir that does not contain references to
shell variables." mean ?

I don't even understand the problem being stated here

And then I think we are substituting "/usr//local" withh NONE in the prefix

But why ?

Of course all the remaining configure.ac is obscure to me and the same goes
for Makefile.am and the contents of the "m4" folder

It would be useful to have a tutorial about how to do that

Or even some hints about what certain things mean, in there

Maybe using a different build system would be easier ?

Maybe WAF or Meson or any other ?
My (limited) experience is limited to Leiningen and Boot, on this

As for the read-o-fobia in the subect: please, don't suggest me to read the
autotools manual. Please 😕