Re: installing a package not from GNU

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Gottfried,

> I wanted to install a package "gtkhash" which I could not find in GNU
> packages.
> How can I install it?
> After downloading it and trying to install it, it said: unknown package
>
> guix install gtkhash-1.4
> guix install: Fehler: gtkhash-1.4: Unbekanntes Paket

Guix only knows of packages for which there is a package definition.
There is no package definition for gtkhash.

Guix unfortunately cannot just take any tarball and build it.

The good news is that writing a package definition (and optionally
adding it to Guix) can be straight forward.  This is the build system
file:

   https://github.com/tristanheaven/gtkhash/blob/master/meson.build

There we see that it needs a bunch of things (like nettle, blake2, zlib,
mbedtls, openssl, etc) for which we should have packages.  Packaging it
may be a little tricky because of the many dependencies, but it looks
doable.  We could do this together if you want.

Another thing I felt the need to clarify: Guix has thousands of packages
that are not GNU packages.  I think you meant that there is no package
definition for gtkhash in gnu/packages/*.scm, which is correct.

-- 
Ricardo