Re: [GSoC update] Porting Guix to GNU/Hurd

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

Manolis Ragkousis <manolis837@gmail.com> skribis:

> 1) Guix can successfully cross-build any package for the Hurd and produce
> the bootstrap-tarballs to build packages with Guix natively on such a system.
>
> 2) Guix can build the native final toolchain.
>
> 3) Guix can build packages natively using the final toolchain.
>
> Even though most of the work is already present in the wip-hurd branch, there
> are still some patches to be reviewed/merged. This will happen asap.
>
> But nevertheless we can safely say we have ported Guix to Hurd. :-)

Congratulations on that!  That’s a great achievement, and I know there
were some bumps on the road, and the project covers several very
different pieces of software, so thumbs up!

> 2) guix/build/syscalls (mount, umount, setns ) Those aren't available
> on Hurd, so
> building Guix would fail. It seems turning them into procedures is
> enough to work
> around this.

This module is only used by GuixSD anyway (not Guix itself), so no
problem.

In the interim, we should perhaps arrange to not build that module when,
say, ‘mount’ is missing (using an ‘AM_CONDITIONAL’.)

> 4) Perl could not be build because of a problem with memmove in hurd's
> glibc. Together
> with Samuel and Justus we traced the problem to a not properly tested
> part of glibc.
> Fixed.

Pheew.  :-)

> 5) glibc-intermediate could not find the gnumach/hurd headers because
> of unsetting the
> path during the build process. It seems that glibc's sysdeps/mach and
> sysdeps/mach/hurd
> configure weren't using the --with-headers variable to get the
> headers. Fixed that and sent
> the patch to bug-hurd :-).

OK.

> 6) Binaries produced from gcc-boot0 had problems with their runpath
> and validate-runpath?
> was failing. It seems ld wasn't passing -rpath to them. Added an
> ld-wrapper, solved.

Interesting, will look at the patch hopefully soon.

> 7) glibc-final's debug output refers to %glibc-bootstrap. I think this
> happens indirectly through
> the headers, currently solving that.

Would be nice to understand why that happens.  In the meantime you could
disable #:allowed-references altogether for that package when on
GNU/Hurd, if you want.

> Also, I am near finishing sys/mount.h for Hurd. Will finish it as soon
> as possible.

Great!

> I get the feeling I forgot some things so please remind/ask me
> anything. For the next two
> days I will wrap up patches and push them to wip-hurd. After that I
> will continue working on
> getting the full GuixSD experience on Hurd. And one of these days we
> will deploy guix on
> darnassus together with rbraunr. I will inform you when that happens.

Excellent.  Thanks to the Hurd and Guix people for giving you a hand!

Cheers,
Ludo’.