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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Paul Boddie <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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

IIRC they removed it because of a bug that didn’t get fix in time.

>> 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.

Yeah.

>> 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.

Nice.  Though to me there are really two sorts of bootstrapping issue:

  1. Whole-distro bootstrapping as discussed at
     <https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Bootstrapping.html>,
     and which is what Mes, stage0, and friends are attempting to solve
     (see <http://bootstrappable.org/projects.html>).

     I also think that the purely functional approach (Guix and Nix)
     makes the bootstrapping path much clearer than with the imperative
     approach (Debian, etc.).

  2. Building Guix itself on a system that doesn’t have it yet, which is
     what we’re discussing here.

Clearly we could solve #1 without solving #2 and vice versa.  These are
fairly orthogonal issues.

>> > 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. ;-)

OK, let us know how it goes!

Ludo’.