Re: how to contribute software?

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hello!

mcconnaughey@jeffnet.org writes:

> My project at experix.sourceforge.net is intended for use in a
> laboratory to operate instruments, collect data from them, analyze and
> present the data graphically, and perform general computations. I am
> interested in making it available […]

Excellent!

> Please give me a little
> guidance on how to package and submit it.

We have a packaging tutorial in the Guix Cookbook:

    https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Packaging-Tutorial.html

This covers pretty much everything you may need to know to write a
package definition.

I see in the experix readme file that users are expected to compile the
source files manually with consecutive invocations of GCC.  While that’s
of course possible to express with Guix we usually encounter
applications and libraries that have some sort of build system, e.g. a
Makefile.

When a build system is used Guix packaging becomes really simple as only
one of the existing build system abstractions has to be selected (and
possibly adjusted).  All of the configuration and compilation steps
would be subsumed by a simple declaration like this:

    (build-system gnu-build-system)

Since you are the author of experix you are in a unique position to add
a build system (such as a simple Makefile) to the experix sources.  This
would be preferable over coding the build instructions in Guix (which is
rather verbose for cases like this).

What do you think?

-- 
Ricardo