Re: Guix-based build tool

[Christopher Lemmer Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> 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’.

While this is a fun idea, I'd still much rather have a guile-based
DSL replacement for autotools type things that's standalone (but maybe
also which can export to shell if need be).

David Thompson has made many comments before on the mistake of mixing
build systems and package managers... I'm a bit worried that we might be
encouraging going down that same path?