Re: Unison GTK UI in unison package

[Arnaud B]

Hello Leo

As you may have seen I'm trying to complete the process of packaging FreeFileSync.

As soon as this is hopefully done - or decidedly way above my current ability -, I'll come back to the Unison case, thanks to your enlightnening input. Thanks for that

Arnaud

2018-04-02 22:16 GMT+02:00 Leo Famulari <address@hidden>:

On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 02:10:22PM +0200, Arnaud B wrote:
> I looked at the ocaml.scm file where the unison package is defined,
> together with ocaml, lablgtk and a number of other related tools. It uses
> the gtk module (gnu packages gtk), in which there is pango as well.

> So it seems everything is in place to build unison and at the same time its
> graphical version, according to the build instructions
> <https://webdav.seas.upenn.edu/svn/unison/branches/2.48/src/INSTALL.gtk2>
> given for that.
> But in the end in my GuixSD as the user having done the installation, I
> just end up with the CLI unison and not unison-gtk2 as expected.
> I tried explicitly installing various packages such as gtk+, lablgtk, and
> then rebuilding the unison package, to no avail.

Basically, the packages that are required to build the Unison GUI, such
as lablgtk, GTK+ itself, etc, are not present in the environment where
Unison is built by Guix. They may be defined in the same source file as
the Unison package, or they may be imported by that file, but this does
not mean they are present in the Unison build environment. Additionally,
installing a package with `guix package --install` has no effect on how
packages are built.

Each time Guix builds a package, it uses an isolated environment that
only includes the software specified in the package definition of the
package being built, as well as "implicit" dependencies that come with
the specified build system.

To make progress on building the Unison GUI, I recommend adding the
required packages to a new inputs field in the Unison package
definition. You can copy the structure of the native-inputs field for
this.

I recommend reading the Introduction of the Guix manual [0], and
continuing to other sections as your interest allows. You will also find
some useful info in Package Reference [1].

Please don't hesitate to ask more questions here or on the Guix IRC
channel, #guix on Freenode.

[0]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Introduction.html

[1]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/package-Reference.html