Confusion regarding rust packages in guix

Confusion regarding rust packages in guix

[Abdullah Imad]

Hello,


I'm trying to package [helix](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix), a 
text editor written in rust. I'm unsure how to write the actual package 
though. The layout is seemingly straight forward - I found a random rust 
package already in guixpkgs and just copied the config - but when it 
comes to `cargo-inputs` and `cargo-development-inputs`, I'm not sure 
what to do. Do I have to define every single variable in `cargo.lock`? 
For bigger projects this seems like an incredible amount of work. Why 
does the guix system require packages to be pulled from guix repos when 
nix just reads the `cargo.lock` and pulls it from crates.io or 
something? Is that not also deterministic, since that's the entire point 
of the `cargo.lock` file? In the flake that helix provides : 
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/flake.nix , the 
individual dependencies are not defined. Am I missing something, or is 
this just how its done?


Thanks,

Abdullah Imad

Re: Confusion regarding rust packages in guix

[Tomas Volf]

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On 2023-11-25 11:22:46 -0500, Abdullah Imad wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> I'm trying to package [helix](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix), a text
> editor written in rust. I'm unsure how to write the actual package though.
> The layout is seemingly straight forward - I found a random rust package
> already in guixpkgs and just copied the config - but when it comes to
> `cargo-inputs` and `cargo-development-inputs`, I'm not sure what to do. Do I
> have to define every single variable in `cargo.lock`? For bigger projects
> this seems like an incredible amount of work. Why does the guix system
> require packages to be pulled from guix repos when nix just reads the
> `cargo.lock` and pulls it from crates.io or something? Is that not also
> deterministic, since that's the entire point of the `cargo.lock` file? In
> the flake that helix provides :
> https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/flake.nix , the individual
> dependencies are not defined. Am I missing something, or is this just how
> its done?

I think people usually use the importer.  For crates it would be something like:

    guix import crate -r PACKAGE-NAME

That will take care of adding all dependencies not yet present in the Guix.  The
generated definitions might need some tweaks though.

> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Abdullah Imad
> 
>

Have a nice day,
Tomas

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

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Re: Confusion regarding rust packages in guix

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 12:38:26AM +0100, Tomas Volf wrote:
> On 2023-11-25 11:22:46 -0500, Abdullah Imad wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > 
> > I'm trying to package [helix](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix), a text
> > editor written in rust. I'm unsure how to write the actual package though.
> > The layout is seemingly straight forward - I found a random rust package
> > already in guixpkgs and just copied the config - but when it comes to
> > `cargo-inputs` and `cargo-development-inputs`, I'm not sure what to do. Do I
> > have to define every single variable in `cargo.lock`? For bigger projects
> > this seems like an incredible amount of work. Why does the guix system
> > require packages to be pulled from guix repos when nix just reads the
> > `cargo.lock` and pulls it from crates.io or something? Is that not also
> > deterministic, since that's the entire point of the `cargo.lock` file? In
> > the flake that helix provides :
> > https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/flake.nix , the individual
> > dependencies are not defined. Am I missing something, or is this just how
> > its done?
> 
> I think people usually use the importer.  For crates it would be something like:
> 
>     guix import crate -r PACKAGE-NAME
> 
> That will take care of adding all dependencies not yet present in the Guix.  The
> generated definitions might need some tweaks though.

I just checked and it doesn't look like you can use the importer for
helix itself.  Also the crates in the workspace, helix-core etc., are
placeholders on crates-io, so you'll need to manually parse the
Cargo.toml files in each of the crates in the project.

crates listed in [dependencies] go in cargo-inputs and
[dev-dependencies] go in cargo-development-inputs.

-- 
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