To contribute to Guix, you'll have to have a few dependencies installed, and after that, follow a few steps which I'll try to explain in here, as the documentation that's now on the guix site is quite scarce (for newbies at least).
There are a few more steps than in most applications, so I'll put them here.
- Install guix. Download the git version from
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/guix.git. Then, ./bootstrap && ./configure && make # make install is optional- Create users. Follow these instructions to create some build users.
- Create the package store. mkdir /nix/store
- Create ~/.guix-profile. This should be created by guix-deamon itself.
- Put ~/.guix-profile in $PATH.
Basic commands
To run any guix command, you should have the guix server running. When you run guix commands, the client will connect to the daemon, and will run the command itself.
We'll try to install and run a test demo that guix users use as a minimal test. It's a helloworld app.
- Run server. ./pre-inst-env guix-daemon --build-users-group=guix-builder
- Search package. ./pre-inst-env scripts/guix package -s hello
- Install package. ./pre-inst-env scripts/guix package -i hello
- Run hello. The hello app should be in your $PATH.
- Remove package. ./pre-inst-env scripts/guix package -r hello
If you installed Guix system-wide (make install), ./pre-inst-env is not needed.
Guix Recipes
If you're trying to write a recipe for guix, here are the steps to follow, and good practices.
First, let's see what's in the 'hello' recipe, and try to understand it. then, we'll add a few things to make it build something more interesting. The file is in gnu/packages/base.scm, so when we open it we see something like this:
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| (define-public hello | |
| (package | |
| (name "hello") | |
| (version "2.9") | |
| (source (origin | |
| (method url-fetch) | |
| (uri (string-append "mirror://gnu/hello/hello-" version | |
| ".tar.gz")) | |
| (sha256 | |
| (base32 "19qy37gkasc4csb1d3bdiz9snn8mir2p3aj0jgzmfv0r2hi7mfzc")))) | |
| (build-system gnu-build-system) | |
| (synopsis "Hello, GNU world: An example GNU package") | |
| (description | |
| "GNU Hello prints the message \"Hello, world!\" and then exits. It | |
| serves as an example of standard GNU coding practices. As such, it supports | |
| command-line arguments, multiple languages, and so on.") | |
| (home-page "http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/") | |
| (license gpl3+))) |
We can see a few interesting lines there. Even if you have no scheme knowledge, you can find out what's going on there. The name and version of the package in some places, the url (mirror:// means "download from any gnu mirror", but could be just a normal URL), description of the package.
The hash code in the sexp (sha256 (base32 "19qy37gkasc4csb1d3bdiz9snn8mir2p3aj0jgzmfv0r2hi7mfzc")) is a checksum of the downloaded file. You can get that number using
./pre-inst-env scripts/guix download URL or
./pre-inst-env scripts/guix hash FILE.
Example Recipe
As an example, we'll build a relatively simple package, luajit.
In guix, recipes are organized in files, but not necessarily one recipe per file. When I wrote the luajit recipe, lua.scm already existed, so it made sense to put it in the same file. If we add a new file, we should add the file in the file gnu-system.am .
Although having different presets for different build systems, many packages need some special tweaking.
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| (arguments | |
| '(#:tests? #f ;luajit is distributed without tests | |
| #:phases (alist-delete 'configure %standard-phases) | |
| #:make-flags (list (string-append "PREFIX=" (assoc-ref %outputs "out"))))) |
Guix installations happen in phases, usng alist-delete we can remove one of them.
We can try the build by using ./pre-inst-env scripts/guix build luajit. If everything is ok, we can submit the patch.
Sending the patch
If the recipe built correctly, and you can install the package, that's the time for sending the recipe.
Make a commit with the recipe. The commit message should start with 'gnu:', and follow the GNU commit guidelines.
$ git format-patch -1 HEAD #will make a patch for the latest commit.
Send the patch to the mail list.
Addendum: Comunity
The community is also important in Free software projects. And this one is really nice. It's small but very helpful. If you have questions, don't hesitate asking in #guix on freenode or in the guix mail list. Here's an example of a recent conversation I had with Ludovic (the main author of the project)
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| <rgc> mm.... can someone try ./pre-inst-env scripts/guix download | |
| http://dist.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/rxvt-unicode-9.19.tar.bz2 , I get an error, but wget | |
| doenloads it correctly... maybe the server expects some header or something that 'guix | |
| download' is not sending, but first I'd like to reproduce it somewhere else [23:47] | |
| * civodul gets 500 "blocked for one hour" [23:48] | |
| <rgc> yup, the same here, but wget does it fine :/ | |
| <civodul> but wget succeeds, indeed | |
| * rgc rolls sleeves [23:49] | |
| <civodul> rgc: can you email bug-guix@gnu.org with that? | |
| <civodul> so we keep track of it | |
| <rgc> sure | |
| <rgc> any signup needed? | |
| <civodul> rgc: no, it's wide open :-) [23:52] | |
| <civodul> wget does "Connection: Keep-Alive" whereas Guile does "Connection: close" [23:53] | |
| <civodul> could be the reason | |
| <civodul> rgc: the problem is the missing 'User-Agent' field [23:57] | |
| <civodul> i'll push a patch | |
| <rgc> ooh, just sent the mail | |
| [lun feb 10 2014] | |
| <civodul> good anyway :-) [00:02] | |
| <civodul> i expected it to be more difficult | |
| <rgc> man, this customer service is amazing :) [00:04] | |
| <civodul> indeed :-) [00:07] | |
| <civodul> if only i could always be this efficient ;-) | |
| <civodul> anyway, good night/day! | |
| *** civodul (~user@gateway/tor-sasl/civodul) has quit: Quit: ERC Version 5.3 (IRC client for Emacs) |
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