how to contribute software?

how to contribute software?

[mcconnaughey]

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 and known to an audience that might be
more attuned to this than Sourceforge's users, since I have had no
contact through Sourceforge for several years and no knowledge of anyone
else using experix. I also want to find people interested in
participating in the ongoing development effort. Please give me a little
guidance on how to package and submit it.

Re: how to contribute software?

[jbranso]

Hello!

How do you build the package?  c-make?  meson?  autotools?

Guix provides some fairly common build systems.  There's a lot of examples of 
package definitions in the guix source code gnu/packages/ directory.  If you
run into any issue packaging, you can always ask more specific questions here
or on irc in #guix.

Best luck!

October 16, 2020 4:35 PM, mcconnaughey@jeffnet.org wrote:

> 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 and known to an audience that might be
> more attuned to this than Sourceforge's users, since I have had no
> contact through Sourceforge for several years and no knowledge of anyone
> else using experix. I also want to find people interested in
> participating in the ongoing development effort. Please give me a little
> guidance on how to package and submit it.

Re: how to contribute software?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

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