bug#48682: recursive import between (gnu packages chez) and (gnu packages racket)

[Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com>]

On 5/29/21 4:15 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
 > In general we cannot use #:select for (gnu packages …) modules because
 > that doesn’t play well with circular module dependencies.

Ah, interesting, I'll keep that in mind. I'm used to Racket, where all 
cyclic module dependencies cause errors at compile time.

Do you have any advice on what would be good practice?

In the near future, I'll want to get the `nanopass` and `stex` origins 
for Racket, potentially via `(package-inputs chez-scheme)`---especially 
because those are not exported variables. And also this part:

 >    - The `chez-scheme` phases `unpack-nanopass+stex`, `configure`,
 >      `prepare-stex`, and `install-doc` should be shared with Racket.
 >      I think it would be better to put them in a build-side module and
 >      actually share them, rather than to do tricky things to extract
 >      their s-expression representation from
 >      `(package-arguments chez-scheme)`. On the other hand, I think a
 >      build system would be overkill: it would only build vanilla Chez
 >      and Racket-flavored Chez.

I'm getting very close to being able to make `racket` accept 
`racket-minimal` as an input, rather than duplicate most of it. This is 
exercising some features Racket has theoretically had for a while, but 
which apparently didn't quite work until ... well, this afternoon it 
worked for me outside of Guix, thanks to a bunch of fixes in the last 
few weeks by Matthew Flatt.

Would it make sense for me, when some useful amount of this works, to 
send a patch series adding a `racket-next` package? I think the changes 
are too much to backport to Racket 8.1.

-Philip