Multiple Versions of Packages?

Multiple Versions of Packages?

[John Darrington]

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I'm trying to package Octave.

It seems that it needs Texinfo to build.  Furthermore, it does not work with Texinfo 5.2 which
is what we have in guix.   I looked at patching it, but it would be non-trivial.

I suspect there is still quite a bit of software in the wild that does not work with Texinfo 5.x
Can we have Texinfo 5 and Texinfo 4 concurrently in guix?


J'

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Re: Multiple Versions of Packages?

[Andreas Enge]

On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 12:13:57PM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
> Can we have Texinfo 5 and Texinfo 4 concurrently in guix?

Yes, without problem. You may add a variable texinfo-4; with a bit of
luck, it can simply inherit from texinfo with a few added modifications.
You may have a look at Qt 4 and 5 for inspiration.

Andreas

Re: Multiple Versions of Packages?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> skribis:

> On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 12:13:57PM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
>> Can we have Texinfo 5 and Texinfo 4 concurrently in guix?
>
> Yes, without problem. You may add a variable texinfo-4; with a bit of
> luck, it can simply inherit from texinfo with a few added modifications.
> You may have a look at Qt 4 and 5 for inspiration.

Indeed, you can really choose what to put in the build environment.
See ‘bison-for-tests’ as another example, in flex.scm.

As an end user, you could choose to have different profiles:

  $ guix package -i texinfo -i guile
  # installs Texinfo 5.2, Guile 2.0.9

  $ guix package -p old-times -i texinfo-4.3 -i guile-1.8.8
  # installs those under ‘old-times’

Ludo’.