Re: packaging a golang package

["Leo Famulari" <leo@famulari.name>]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021, at 02:01, Timmy Douglas wrote:
> 
> I recently installed guix for the first time and I wanted to try to
> package my first program. The one I decided to try is written in go and
> uses go.mod (https://github.com/coredns/coredns/blob/master/go.mod) for
> modules. Running `go build` would normally download those if they don't
> exist.
> 
> I took a look at a couple of other packages, and it looks like the right
> way to do it would be to package the individual modules as seen in
> guix/gnu/packages/golang.scm. Has anyone tried automating this sort of
> thing? There are almost 40 dependencies...

Thanks for working on this!

It's true, Go programs usually have a dependency graph that is uncomfortably large — although not impossibly large like Rust.

There is a work-in-progress implementation of a Go package importer that I believe should make it easier:

https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/44178

You could try it out and, if it works for you, send those patches, and give feedback on the importer as well :)

As for the versioning, the Guix package tree can include multiple versions of a package. Search for "inherit" in the crates-io.scm package module for some examples. We would like to improve how this works, again for Go and Rust, because it's such a common requirement.