Guix-based build tool

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:

> Indeed, I love working with Guix and developing with Guix. Guix takes
> care of my deployment and configuration requirements.
>
> I have written some time in the past that with Guix you don't need
> autotools. The main thing autotools solve is configuring the build for
> an environment. At the same time, with Guix you get a predictable
> environment, so a make file (or similar) suffices. It is what I do in
> all my development projects - I don't use autotools to develop and
> deploy them. It greatly simplifies my existence :). Indeed, I have
> never liked autotools (essentially a nasty hack) and only used them
> before Nix/Guix. So, my approach is the same as yours :) 

+1!

If we could provide tooling with an abstraction level close to that of a
makefile, that’d help a lot.

Actually, just like we have ‘emacs-build-system’, we could very much add
‘guile-build-system’ for simple Guile packages that don’t need/use
Autoconf & co.

‘guile-build-system’ would automatically run ‘guild compile’,
‘makeinfo’, etc. pretty much like we do here:

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/guile.scm#n870

Once we have that, developers of Guile packages can simply drop a
‘.guix’ file in their project and use it with ‘guix environment’, ‘guix
build’, and ‘guix package’.

That’s coarser-grain than a makefile, of course, but would be a good
first step to providing tooling for people working on Guile code.

Any takers for ‘guile-build-system’?


A next step could be to add a tool that understands a syntax like that
of the guildhall, which gets us closer to the makefile/Makefile.am level
of abstraction:

  https://github.com/ijp/guildhall/blob/master/docs/packaging.texi#L121

Ludo’.