Re: Workflow management with GNU Guix

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

Roel Janssen <address@hidden> writes:

> The usage of a pipeline/workflow is somewhat different from the
> package construction, because we want to run the sequence of commands
> on different data sets (as opposed to running it on the same source
> code).

Is this not conceptually the same thing as changing the 'source' field
of a package recipe?  With the new package transformation feature[0],
this can be done "on the fly" like:

    guix build emacs --with-source=emacs-25.1-alpha.tar.xz

Maybe a "process" can just be a build phase, and a "workflow" a build
system, as they currently exist in Guix.  Not sure what a "script" would
be, though build phases can easily execute shell commands, scripts, and
so on within the build directory.

That means one could write a "package recipe" that doesn't really build
a package from source code, but rather creates arbitrary output files
from arbitrary input files.  (Same thing to Guix anyway.)  The 'source'
field of the recipe would contain some dummy value, and one would
specify the real input like:

    guix build processed-data --with-source=raw-data-2016-05-12.txt

So maybe Guix already has everything you need? :-) Not sure if I fully
understand the problem domain though, so apologies if I'm missing the
point.

Taylan


[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-02/msg00001.html