Elixir upstream question

Elixir upstream question

[Pjotr Prins]

I raised issue https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/5043

Jose Valim, the author of Elixir, responded with:

---

I would love to include patches that generally make Mix or Elixir work
better but those seem like they would be putting a maintenance burden
on us, specially because we don't really know what is available on GNU
Guix and what is not. We would be guessing, specially when some of
those outcomes is exactly what we are testing (like handling of the
HOME environment variable).

Can't we rather try figure out if we can set a reliable PATH for
running those tests suites so we can use dialyzer and git as usual?

---

git and some other tools can be invoked from one place and patched. I
can help fix that.

My question: in the build environment, what would be a good stub for
$HOME? Can we use something for $TMPDIR?

In the test phase there appear to be write errors in the build dir -
any idea why that would be?

Thanks,

Pj.

Re: Elixir upstream question

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

> I raised issue https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/5043
>
> Jose Valim, the author of Elixir, responded with:
>
> ---
>
> I would love to include patches that generally make Mix or Elixir work
> better but those seem like they would be putting a maintenance burden
> on us, specially because we don't really know what is available on GNU
> Guix and what is not. We would be guessing, specially when some of
> those outcomes is exactly what we are testing (like handling of the
> HOME environment variable).
>
> Can't we rather try figure out if we can set a reliable PATH for
> running those tests suites so we can use dialyzer and git as usual?
>
> ---
>
> git and some other tools can be invoked from one place and patched. I
> can help fix that.
>
> My question: in the build environment, what would be a good stub for
> $HOME? Can we use something for $TMPDIR?

It is okay to set the HOME environment variable.  A couple of packages
that need to write to $HOME for tests do this in a build phase.

Here’s a snippet from the “asymptote” package:

         (add-before 'check 'set-HOME
           ;; Some tests require write access to $HOME, otherwise leading to
           ;; "failed to create directory /homeless-shelter/.asy" error.
           (lambda _
             (setenv "HOME" "/tmp")
             #t))

Does this help or am I misunderstanding?

~~ Ricardo