Re: Guile-Git, bytestructures, libgit2 and Guix 0.14.0

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 12. December 2017 17.29.43 Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> 
> Paul Boddie <address@hidden> skribis:
> > I also found that the packaged version of libgit2 on Debian Jessie
> > doesn't export the git_libgit2_init symbol for some reason:
> > 
> > ice-9/boot-9.scm:106:20: In procedure dynamic-pointer: Symbol not found:
> > git_libgit2_init
> 
> This suggests a bug in the Debian packaging (or an old version?).

Yes, it looks pretty awkward. Debian packaging for Guile seems all over the 
place. I don't see the Guile-TLS package for Stretch (guile-gnutls), for 
instance, which has kept me from just switching to that distribution version:

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=guile-gnutls

> But yeah, I can sympathize with all the pain you’ve gone through to
> build all this by hand.  That’s a chicken-and-egg problem: the package
> manager is here to help you sort this out, but you’re precisely trying
> to build it.

Right. If one is already on board, it's just a matter of staying on board, but 
getting on board and also doing it from scratch gives us some opportunities to 
see whether the approach still works conveniently.

> Pjotr Prins reported earlier that we don’t have a good bootstrapping
> story here, and I come to realize what it means.  ;-)

Debian has a similar experience, which is why there are efforts to improve 
bootstrapping. As you know, I was also interested in cross-bootstrapping, and 
there has also been some more interest in that within the Debian realm, 
perhaps because there have been a few new to-be-supported architectures 
recently and people have probably become more easily frustrated about the 
problems they have encountered than they might have been before.

I have some interest in building distributions from scratch, but I find the 
process rather opaque with Debian, which rather explains my interest in 
looking at Guix instead.

> The lesson here, I guess, is that it would be beneficial to make Guix’s
> modularity more apparent, as I did in
> <https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=27284#121>, so that one
> can build Guix piecemeal, without having to install all the dependencies
> upfront.

Perhaps. I don't have enough experience here to weigh in on that. :-)

[...]

> > ERROR: In procedure memoize-variable-access!:
> > ERROR: gzip: unbound variable
> > Makefile:5295: recipe for target 'make-go' failed
> 
> I’m pretty sure we solved it recently but I forgot how.  Do you have the
> problem on current master?

This is with 0.14.0. I could try with the current master when I'm done trying 
to build 0.13.0 bootstrap tarballs, hopefully successfully. ;-)

Paul