Hi Alexis,



I've been doing some Rust packaging recently, so maybe this will help you to get started. Here's how I would approach it.



Explore the software

====================

The first thing I did was explore whether Typst builds in a current Guix environment. If we don't have the right version of Rust, for example, there's little point continuing:



- clone it into an appropriate place

- start a shell: 

    $ guix shell --container --network rust rust-cargo coreutils openssl nss-certs gcc-toolchain



We need 'openssl' and 'nss-certs' so that cargo will work. 



- build it: 

    [env]$ env CC=gcc cargo build



Kept failing on ring v0.17.5 which is looking for 'cc'. It builds with 296 crates, so we might have our hands full here! Eventually outputs a /target/debug/typst command which seems to work.





Import using Guix import

=========================

Normally, we'd be able to use the `crates` importer. But, the Typst crates are just place-holders with no details. 



AFAIK the importer only works with crates-io, we can't feed it Cargo.toml file directly. We'll need to manually create a package and check for any dependencies.



Manually create a top-level package

====================================

To manually create the package we have to go through the projects Cargo.toml.



- create an intial typst.scm file in some project directory.

- create a minimal typst package by looking in Cargo.lock at 'typst'

- for each dependency look at what the Cargo.lock used to build it - check whether we have it in Guix

- in some cases we will have the crate, but not the right version



Import the dependencies

=============================

The first crate that I found which we don't have in the Guix archive is 'comemo' [0]. We can import this with: 



    $ guix shell --development guix --container --nesting --network nss-certs

    [env]$ guix import crate --recursive comemo@0.3.0 > comemo-import.scm



Move these package definitions into your main `typst.scm` file. Check them to add any missing development dependencies.



The first one in the dependency stack is `rust-comemo-0.3` which we reference at the bottom of the file. We try and build it as the importer has pulled it in:



    $ guix shell --development guix --container --nesting 

    [env]$ guix build --load-path=./ --file=typst.scm

    <successfully builds>



The next one `rust-comemo-macros` which has been set to `skip-build: #t`, we'll try building it that way initially:



    - add rust-comemo-macros-0.3 to the bottom of the typst.scm file

    - comment out the rust-comemo-0.3 line

    - try and build with: guix build --load-path=./ --file=typst.scm 



    - If it builds successfully, change the `skip-build: #t` part of the definition to be #f.

        - error[E0433]: failed to resolve: use of undeclared crate or module `comemo`

            - tried adding comemo as a dependency which didn't work

            - set it to #:tests? #f - for now



There's some more things that have to be done to 'contribute' these packages, but for now I would move onto the next dependency. And that's all there is to this part - finding the dependencies and importing them.



Building a dependent package that's not a crate

===============================================

The cargo-build-system expects to build everything from Crates AFAIK. I believe it will take some messing around with the phases to add the typst-lib which seems to be a dependency. It looks like librsvg (in gnome.scm) does a lot of messing with phases, and greetd (in admin.scm) does some as well - these might be good examples to look at.



Hopefully this is enough to get you started!



Steve



[0] https://crates.io/crates/comemo