Re: Building, packaging and updating Guix with confidence

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

I’m late to the party, but I like your thoughtful message.

Josselin Poiret <dev@jpoiret.xyz> skribis:

> What I personally think, is that we should rationalize the way we
> interact with Guix source: a running Guix should always be able to hold
> a reference to its source.  The guix package or future equivalent
> (ie. good for internal consumption) should always refer to that same
> source, but that will also require factoring the daemon (and extensions)
> out of the repository, so that the C code doesn't get compiled again on
> every unrelated commit.  Finally, and I think this is the most
> challenging one, we should try to keep the differences between a) and c)
> to the minimum, meaning that one way of building has to go.  This is a
> big change, conceptually and technically, and I understand that this
> might be way more complicated that we'd like, but I think this needs to
> be done at some point.

I definitely agree.

I’d summarize things a bit differently:

  1. We have two build systems for the same software: the GNU build
     system and (guix self).

  2. We have that crazy ‘guix’ package snapshot, which causes the
     problems you mentioned.

Both contribute to a poor developer experience, but I believe they can
be addressed separately.

It’s not clear that #1 is much of a problem in practice.  Someone who
contributes to Guix may have to touch gnu/local.mk, but that rarely goes
beyond that.  It’s annoying, but it’s not clear to me that it’s a
showstopper for newcomers.

One thing that would be nice is getting rid of ‘guix-daemon’ and
replacing it with a pure Scheme/Guix way of building the C++ code that
(guix self) would use.

#2 is the main issue to me.  There’s an open bug about it¹, which I’d
like to address at least in the context of the installer.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53210