Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Hi Alex,
>
>> This patch adds clojure 1.6 to 1.8.
>
> Wow.  Thanks!
>
Thanks for the review too!

> Usually, we just keep the latest version unless there are packages that
> dependend on an older version.  In the case of the IcedTea packages, for
> example, we need version 6 to be able to bootstrap the others.
>
> In my opinion we should just add Clojure version 1.8 for now.  In any
> case (if other people decide that we should have more than one version)
> please only add one package per patch.  It’s a little tedious to split
> stuff up, I know, but it makes handling repository history and partial
> reverts much easier. 
>
I see. So the general policy here is to be lazy and packaged by need :)
This time only version 1.8 is added. Does this apply to splitting
bundled libraries as well? I see clojure has some java libraries bundled
such as ASM. Currently, I suppose no other packages depend on it.

> I see that you added a very large patch to make this work.  In Guix we
> usually avoid patching upstream software unless it’s absolutely
> necessary.  Have you thought about submitting your patch upstream to
> enable compilation with GCJ?  I think we should not add extensive
> patches like that unless they are considered by the upstream developers.
>
> It’s also not so pretty that you have to call “gcj” and “g++” in a
> somewhat complicated build phase “build-native”.  If you can get
> upstream to accept your patches to build with GCJ maybe you can slip in
> a patch to add a new Makefile target as well?  This would greatly
> simplify the build phases.
>
I see clojure is written only in java and clojure. I will ask for
upstream advice on this one.

> Mmyeah… this is really not pretty.  Also: wrapping the whole package
> expression in this “get-version” let-binding is not nice.
>
> Have you thought of instead writing a procedure that produces a Clojure
> package given a particular version?  Similar to the “custom-gcc”
> procedure maybe?
>
Now only version 1.8 is added, the problem has gone temporarily. But it
is interesting to know how the gcc package solves this problem.

> Again, thanks a lot for the effort!  I really hope we can add Clojure to
> Guix soon.
>
> ~~ Ricardo

Thanks,
Alex