Re: Questions about Cuirass

[James Hobson]

Sorry for not getting back to you.

Looks promising!

I wish I could release everything under a free license. Baby steps though! I’ve 
managed to release a few things under LGPL since I started! That’s 100% more 
than before!

But anyway. The biggest hurdle I see is that updating in an air gapped 
environment doesn’t seem supported because guix’s git url is hard coded. Does 
this need to be the case? If not, I might see if I can find an nice way of 
making this more configurable

James

> On 21 Oct 2022, at 11:01, Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> wrote:
> 
> On 20-10-2022 23:19, James Hobson wrote:
>> Hello!
>> Currently evaluating guix for embedded systems at work. But I have a few 
>> questions that I can’t quite work out from the docs. Please feel no 
>> obligation to answer!
>> Please note that my guix journey is at its very beginning. I’ve not even had 
>> a go at packaging!
>> Question 1
>> We would need to host the guix substitute server in an airgapped 
>> environment. The server would contain plain guix packages, our in house 
>> packages, and maybe patched guix packages. Would that be possible without 
>> having to rebuild the entire guix package set? We don’t have so many build 
>> machines, especially not for armv7.
> 
> You can tell Cuirass to only build a selection of packages (and their 
> dependencies), by using a manifest, then not all of Guix is compiled but only 
> what's necessary for your particular purpose.
> 
> Also, your Cuirass instance still needs access to the source code of the 
> packages somehow, which will need to be somehow be squared with your 
> 'airgapped environment', though maybe 'copy over the result of guix build 
> --sources=transitive" would be acceptable (*).
> 
> (*) except that this is after application of snippet; some kind of 
> "--sources=raw,transitive" may be needed.
> 
>> Question 2 [...]
> 
> I don't know the answer to this.
> 
>> Question 3
>> Our software is sadly proprietary. Is there a way for guix build to 
>> selectively unpack and patch all non-proprietary sources so that we can 
>> provide it to anyone who asks? I feel like if this isn’t a thing already, I 
>> guess I can write it in scheme?
> 
> I assume you meant 'patch all non-proprietary' -> 'patch out all 
> proprietary', such that at least the free parts can be used?
> 
> In that case, this is done already in some package definitions in Guix, by a 
> 'snippet' removing parts that are non-free, such that they are not built and 
> are not part of "guix build --source". (See: ‘Snippets versus Phases’ in the 
> documentation, though it doesn't mention non-free things directly).
> 
> The Guix user can still access the unpatched source code though, by 
> inspecting the package definition and removing the snippet, so it looks to me 
> like that option is only good for 'you aren't allowed to modify this part of 
> the source code + guix build --source must produce something free', not for 
> 'you aren't allowed to see or distribute this' situations.
> 
> Alternatively, you could avoid all this complexity by making your software 
> free.
> 
> Greetings,
> Maxime.
> <OpenPGP_0x49E3EE22191725EE.asc>