Re: [Chicken-hackers] CHICKEN on GuixSD

[Dan Leslie]

AFAICT, Chicken only supports sourcing eggs from a single repository.
You can change the repository at build, run, or install time, but there
is only ever one repository.

http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Extensions#changing-repository-location

-Dan

On 2016-07-18 08:01 PM, John J Foerch wrote:
> 
> For guix, there are three cases to consider: default extensions,
> chicken-install'd extensions, and extensions installed as guix packages.
> If all extensions get installed to a global directory (like
> /var/lib/chicken/8) then this causes two problems:
> 
> 1. Default extensions must be in this global location also, which means
> that they would not be isolated from other copies of chicken on the
> system.
> 
> 2. This could preclude packaging chicken eggs as guix extensions,
> because it precludes them being in the store.  I'm not familiar enough
> to say for sure, though.
> 
> -John
> 
> 
> Dan Leslie <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> Does setting CHICKEN_REPOSITORY not direct chicken-install where to put 
>> binaries?
>>
>> Ie, for MSYS2 I set it to tell chicken's tools where to find them.
>>
>> http://wiki.call-cc.org/msys2
>>
>> -Dan
>>
>> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
>>   Original Message  
>> From: John J Foerch
>> Sent: Monday, July 18, 2016 5:46 PM
>> To: address@hidden
>> Subject: [Chicken-hackers] CHICKEN on GuixSD
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have been working with the operating system GuixSD
>> <https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/>, and for those not familiar, it is
>> similar to NixOS: programs get installed to a store, isolated from other
>> programs on the system, rather than to global directories like /bin,
>> /usr/bin, etc. The 'bin' and 'lib' directories and so on end up as a
>> tree of symlinks pointing into the store - quite a novel approach to
>> package management that gives a number of unique features, but I
>> digress.
>>
>> The guix chicken package has the problem that chicken-install does not
>> work, and I'm discussing solutions with guix devs, and thought it would
>> be helpful to put the question here as well.
>>
>> When one installs chicken, it gets installed to the store, with a prefix
>> like this:
>>
>> /gnu/store/<hash>-chicken-4.11.0/
>>
>> The binaries are under that in 'bin/', libchicken under it in 'lib/',
>> and the default extensions under the prefix in 'var/lib/chicken/8/'.
>> This store directory is read-only, so one encounters the impossibility
>> of installing more extensions.
>>
>> It was suggested that to allow chicken-install to work, the global
>> /var/lib/chicken/8/ should be added to the extension path. The problem
>> with that is of course that chicken supports only one repository-path,
>> so default extensions would have to go there too, as would any
>> extensions that were installed as guix packages, breaking the package
>> management paradigm of the store.
>>
>> On NixOS, they patch chicken to allow additional repository paths given
>> by the environment variable CHICKEN_REPOSITORY_EXTRA and the chicken
>> variable repository-extra-paths. It looks to me like Moritz and Caolan
>> have worked on this.
>>
>> I wanted to ask what views chicken devs have on this kind of situation,
>> whether the patch that NixOS uses is a good way to go, and whether there
>> are plans for multiple repository paths to be added to chicken in the
>> future.
>>
>> Link to the discussion on guix-user:
>>
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.guix.user/776
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> --
>> John Foerch
>>
>>
>>
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> 
> 
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