Re: [PATCH] gnu: Make "guix-devel" a public variable in package-management.scm

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Chris,

Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> skribis:

> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

[...]

>>  (define-public guix guix-devel)
>>  
>> +(define-public guix-for-environment
>> +  ;; We provide this pseudo-package just to allow people to run:
>> +  ;;   guix environment guix-devel
>> +  ;; to reliably get the development environment for Guix (using 'guix' for
>> +  ;; this purpose does not work when 'guix' points to the built-from-tarball
>> +  ;; package rather than to the built-from-checkout package.)
>> +  (package
>> +    (inherit guix-devel)
>> +    (name "guix-devel")
>> +    (source #f)                                   ;not meant to be built
>> +    (supported-systems '())))
>> +
>>  (define (source-file? file stat)
>>    "Return true if FILE is likely a source file, false if it is a typical
>>  generated file."
>>
>>
>> ?
>>
>> If that’s fine with you, could you incorporate it in your patch?
>
> Sounds good to me.  I've attached the updated patch to this email and
> mentioned you as co-author.  The new package fails to build with a
> cryptic error, but since it isn't meant to be built, that seems OK.
>
> What is the purpose of temporarily changing the "guix" variable to refer
> to the release package (as in commit 4420940f)?  Because it usually
> refers to the development version, wouldn't it be better to make the
> "guix" variable ALWAYS refer to the development version?  It isn't clear
> to me why we need to temporarily change this variable to refer to the
> release version.

Somehow this question turned out to be difficult to answer to me, which
contributed to the delay.  ;-)

I think you’re right: in a way, this is a bit silly.  This is a purist’s
approach (when we have the tarball, no need to depend on Autoconf et
al.), but it would work just fine if we simply added the ‘native-inputs’
currently on ‘guix-devel’ to ‘guix-0.11.0’ itself.

If there are no objections, I’ll just do that.

Thanks, and sorry for taking so long for such a simple answer!

Ludo’.