Re: Internship on Improve the user experience for the "guix package" command line tool (Outreachy)

[Björn Höfling]

Hi Vijayalakshmi,

welcome to Guix!


On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 20:45:02 +0530
Vijayalakshmi Vedantham <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm really sorry about the effort you had to put into this patch.
> I'll try not to do it again.

Seriously: I hope you are not discouraged by that. And I hope you do it
again and again. Including the errs. Guix is tough stuff and we all
did and do our mistakes. And each one helps to understand the system a
bit better.

And I really like this community because it is so soft and helpful
and polite :-)


> >
> > I also noticed that the sources include files that were generated
> > with Cython.  Instead of reusing those, we build them from source.
> > Luckily all we have to do in this case is to add “python-cython” to
> > the native-inputs field.
> >  
> 
> Can I know how you knew this?

I can't speak for Ricardo but only for me: There is some
intrinsic knowledge about each build system and each programming
language, how they generate things, and how this relates to "building
your software really from source in a FSF-compliant way".

Just look at how others have done it in their package definitions.
Present your package definition and get it reviewed. People will hint
you politeful to this knowledge.



>      Have you been able to build Guix already and try building the
> package using “./pre-inst-env guix build”?
> 
> No, I tried last night but I faced some issues, I'll try again
> tonight.

Before submitting a patch, try to build it at least twice. If you have
trouble to build it, submit it anyway and tell why it doesn't build
(twice, because of reproducibility).

Take a look at the Manual at

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Packaging-Guidelines

and


https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Submitting-Patches

The latter one is like a checklist to go through before submitting.

Happy Guix-ing,

Björn

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