Re: Trying to contribute packages: ./pre-inst-env doesn't work

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Doron Behar <address@hidden> writes:

> Plus, do I have to run make after every change to a package definition!?
> Will it compile everything from the ground up after every such change? I
> wish these technical details would have been documented...

“make” does not cause recompilation of unchanged things.  This is
not particular to Guix, so it’s not documented as part of Guix.

> I also noticed it runs GUILEC - is it really necessary?

It compiles Guile modules.  Using compiled modules is faster than having
to interpret everything.  You can try without compiling changed modules
but the performance penalty when you have lots of interpreted modules
will likely be hard to tolerate.

> It seems that we, package maintainers, or to put it simply - the
> community, need to be too much involved in the source code of
> everything in order to help the distributions.

Packages in Guix are Scheme values bound to variable names.  Packaging
is a simple form of programming.

> because as I dive more and more into
> Guix I feel there have been made a lot of poor design choices in it..

This is a surprising statement and naturally I disagree with it :)  I
suggest to take a step back when the frustration of learning something
new makes you want to say harsh things.

--
Ricardo