Re: GuixSD on arm

[Jookia <166291@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 10:53:14AM +0200, t3sserakt wrote:
> That would be very kind. I would endeavor that your work will not be for
> nothing.
> Like Alex I also had the experience, that you need a lot of patience
> when participating
> in free software development. There are a lot of volunteer with more or
> less time
> for working on a huge amount of tasks.
> 
> Maybe right now it is not the time for Guix on arm, but I hope you can
> be encouraged
> to give this community another chance in the future.
> 
> t3sserakt

Hi again, I've found my old Guix repo: https://notabug.org/Jookia/guix
It's about a month old, and I think works. There's these branches:

- SET_jookia

This is just compilation of all the branches to make a usable system.

- WIP_av

This branch adds JACK support to OpenAL, ffmpeg and ALSA. The ALSA patches can
be used to add PulseAudio configuration.
It also adds the OpenShot video editor, and bumps libsndfile down to allow
Blender to work with FLAC files properly.

Not pushed upstream because of the effort it'd take.

- WIP_freedoom

Adds Odaemx, chocolate-doom, crispy-doom for playing Doom WADs. Includes
Freedoom WAD and these are patched to do autodetection: You can just run 'guix
environment --ad-hoc odamex freedoom' and Odamex will find your WADs!
It also includes the Eureka level editor and Rocket Launcher 2.0 launcher.

Not pushed upstream because of the effort it'd take. Require WIP_sdl-union.

- WIP_gdk-pixbuf

Disables gdk-pixbuf test that freezes my 2G RAM system when building Guix. I
submitted this to Guix, but I think the response was along the lines of 'see why
the test breaks' and I didn't have the resources to debug something that would
completely lock up my system so I gave up.

- WIP_grub-platform

Majority of work to improve/decouple GRUB work here, it's what you'll be
interested in. All patches are thoroughly documented, and tested. In summary it
does some refactoring and adds the ability for GRUB 'platforms' to specified in
the system configuration. This is what you'd find on the mailing list.

My plan of attack for modularing the bootloader system was to reduce the
references to GRUB functions and assumptions as much as possible outside of
gnu/system/grub.scm then create an interface based on that for bootloaders.

- WIP_localstatedir

Not intended to be pushed upstream, it just makes source builds compatible with
binary Guix packages by default by setting the state directory to /var rather
than /usr/local/var. Suggested upstream, but it breaks some conventions.

A fix was implemented where if you already have Guix installed, but why would
you if you're boostrapping from source like I was?

- WIP_luks-keyfiles

Add LUKS device that supports being unlocked by a keyfile. Puts your key in a
globally readable initramfs in /gnu/store. Not secure if for some reason someone
has access to your /gnu/store but wants to unlock your machine when powered off.

Submitted upstream in big LUKS+LVM discussion, didn't really go anywhere.

- WIP_lvm

Adds LVM device mapping. Untested after the rebase, and probably the very wrong
way to do it since the device mapping system needs to be overhauled IMHO to
support concepts of mapping input multiple devices to multiple outputs, like
/dev/sda + /dev/sdf to LVM /dev/matrix/root and /dev/matrix/swap on a RAID
system. Currently it only goes /dev/xxx -> /dev/mapper/xxx. The same flaw
prevents chaining mapped devices like LUKS to LVM as they won't resolve
dependencies.

Submitted upstream in big LUKS+LVM discussion, didn't really go anywhere.

- WIP_mapped-devices

Disables dependency management so devices and device mappings load serially, so
device mappings can depend on each other.

Submitted upstream in big LUKS+LVM discussion, didn't really go anywhere.

- WIP_pioneer

Adds the Pioneer space simulator game.

Not pushed upstream because I didn't want to participate. May require
WIP_sdl-union.

- WIP_proxies

Adds HTTP proxy support for SVN and Git checkouts, so you can build over Tor.
Regular files don't work with HTTPS proxies since Guile doesn't support that.

Submitted upstream, used a wrong SRFI, I forgot about the patch and eventually
didn't want to participate.

- WIP_rsnapshot

Adds rsnapshot.

Not pushed upstream because I didn't want to participate.

- WIP_sdl-union

When bulding either Pioneer or Odamex, I found sdl-config reported the wrong
include directory. This fixes it by having sdl-config report the union's include
directory rather than just SDL's

I was going to submit this upstream, but when I brought up the bug with the
maintainer I got a blunt response implying the bug didn't exist. I gave up
communication altogether with developers altogether after this.

When rebasing I found that a bunch of packages already worked around this bug
which is why it wasn't an issue, so I removed the workarounds in the branch.

- WIP_themes

Adds Numix and Numix icon theme, including circles. Looks great.

Not pushed upstream because I didn't want to participate.

- Summary

I hope you (or the Guix community) get something out of this before it bitrots.

Jookia.