Re: Development shell for diffutils does not appear to work - what am I doing wrong?

[Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au>]

Hi Daniel,

On Tue, Sep 26 2023, Daniel Littlewood wrote:
> I want to try out making a simple change to the program `diff`, which is part of GNU diffutils: https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/diffutils/3.8/ I'd like to set up a dev environment, patch diff.c, rebuild it and try out the new binary. Maybe install it globally later, but I'm not there yet.

There's a few emails in this thread about how to get your git clone working, but I thought it might also be helpful to mention a potentially easier workflow here.

The --development argument gives you an environment that is suitable for hacking on the source that "guix build --source" gives you. With that in mind, I just checked that this works:

  $ tar xf $(guix build --source diffutils)
  $ cd diffutils-3.8/
  $ guix shell --development diffutils -- ./configure
  ... lots of output ...
  $ guix shell --development diffutils -- make
  ... lots of output ...

Then you can change the source in the diffutils-3.8 directory and recompile it with "guix shell --development diffutils -- make".

If you want to install it to a profile later, you can use something like "guix install diffutils --with-source=path/to/diffutils-3.8/".

If you then want to upstream your changes, you can manually move your fixes into a git checkout.

Carlo