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

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Vijayalakshmi,

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

Oh, you misunderstood.  This kind of reworking of patches is very
normal.  It happens all the time and is a normal part of patch
review.

Some of these problems, however, could have been found before sending
the patch.  It is good to first try to actually build the package.  This
can give you error messages that can guide your way to a working package
definition.

> I had to append “.zip” because Pypi didn’t have a “.tar.gz” file for the
>> sources, so the uri
>> field now is:
>>
>>    (pypi-uri "logwrap" version ".zip")
>>
>
> Did you do this because only .zip is available here (
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/logwrap#downloads)?

That’s correct.

>> 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 looked at the included “setup.py” as I was trying to understand how
the tests are supposed to be run.  There I stumbled upon a check for
Cython, which is optional.  Usually, this means that the archive
includes generated files and it will only regenerate them from source if
Cython is found.  By adding “python-cython” to the native-inputs I make
sure that Cython is found when the package is built.

>> Finally, the tests. At first the tests wouldn’t run.  So I looked up the
>> error message online and found that I need to use “python-pytest-runner”
>> in addition to “python-pytest”.  This allows the tests to run up to a
>> point until it wants to do coverage tests.  For those I needed to add
>> “python-pytest-cov”.
>>
>> I changed the description, because I think it wasn’t quite correct.
>>
>
> Again, I'm sorry.

No worries!

>      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.

You’re welcome to share your progress and the exact error messages (text
is better than screenshots) here if you feel stuck.  Being able to build
packages with your modified version of Guix is pretty important for all
development work in Guix.

--
Ricardo

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