GSoC: Porting Guix to Hurd week 2 report

[Manolis Ragkousis <manolis837@gmail.com>]

Hello Guix, Hello Hurd

Time for the second report. Will report what happened in chronological
order like the last time.

1) I modified gnumach-headers and hurd-headers packages so they will use
"--build=i686-pc-gnu" only when not cross-building.

2) Mig needs flex for both build and run time. So I added flex as both an input
and a native input. Before we were getting a linking error when cross-building.

3) Flex and bison could not be built with when targeting the hurd.
This was because of the
dependency lists m4->bison-2.7->flex and m4->bison.

4) m4 for some reason would run make test even when cross-compiling.
So when hurd
was targeted (and mips as Ludovic pointed out today) it would fail. I
disabled the tests
when cross-building in my local repo and spent quite some time waiting
for the whole
rebuild to finish :P. In any case, Ludovic pushed today at master, a
patch that fixes that.

5) Tomorrow if not today I will have ready the bootstrap-tarballs. I
modified make-boostrap.scm
to use the hurd headers, and everything up to %glibc-bootstrap-tarball
builds fine. I am waiting
for the current build to finish to report on the rest.

There was a problem with the libpthread native input where
(copy-recursively (assoc-ref inputs
 "libpthread") "libpthread") would evaluate to (copy-recursively #f
"libpthread"), when creating the tarballs.
I changed it to use %build-inputs and it seemed to work, but after
Thomas uploaded the
glibc-hurd+ libpthread tarball, I removed the problematic part all together.
In any case we should still investigate this one.

6) As I said above Thomas uploaded today a glibc-hurd+ libpthread
tarball. With this, our package
definition for glibc/hurd became as simple as it could possibly get in
this form. The patches are gone.
I can sleep with ease now. Thank you Thomas :-).

I was thinking about following Mark's suggestion of having a generic
glibc package with all the common
configure flags and inputs, and the two others inheriting from it,
defining the specific sources and
inputs/flags. WDYT?

Ludovic I don't have anything to report on the binaries actually
running on hurd right now,
because I am hoping to test that with the actual bootstrap tarballs.

I think that's it for this week. If you have any questions please feel
free to ask :-)

Manolis