pulling cmake ExternalProject during guix builds

pulling cmake ExternalProject during guix builds

[Erik Garrison]

Hi help-guix,

Apologies for the spam, but I'm new here and not sure if IRC or the mailing
list is a better channel to use for help. In any case, this will be
searchable later.

I'm using cmake's ExternalProject_Add functionality to manage project
dependencies, but this is not usable with guix's build containerization
system. I get "Could not resolve host: ..." when cmake invokes git to try
to clone the repositories.

Can network access be provided to the build container? Or, is there perhaps
another low-effort workaround in guix?

As far as I understand, the only reasonable alternative to add the
dependencies as submodules in the main repo? This will still work with the
ExternalProject_Add pattern, but it adds an extra point of configuration,
and users will need to use a recursive git clone, which is sometimes
confusing.

Thanks in advance for the clarification,

Erik

Re: pulling cmake ExternalProject during guix builds

[John Soo]

Hi Erik,

> Can network access be provided to the build container? Or, is there perhaps
> another low-effort workaround in guix?

This is by design. Network access would make our builds nondeterministic.

> As far as I understand, the only reasonable alternative to add the
> dependencies as submodules in the main repo? This will still work with the
> ExternalProject_Add pattern, but it adds an extra point of configuration,
> and users will need to use a recursive git clone, which is sometimes
> confusing.

You may want to package those dependencies separately and then include them as inputs to your bigger package.

Which dependencies are they, anyways? Generally guix tries to keep vendored dependencies out of packages.

Hope that helps,

John