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<mark_weaver>I think for now you should just pass --system=i686-linux to all the builds, and when civodul comes back, ask him if there's a better way.

<phant0mas>okay

<phant0mas>sorry for going so slow

<phant0mas>:-)

<phant0mas>my uncle was in town and I went to pay him a visit

<mark_weaver>no worries, I don't think you're being particularly slow.

<phant0mas>btw something else I wanted to ask you

<phant0mas>you told me you used to write drivers right?

<phant0mas>do you have any good books in your mind that I could read?

<mark_weaver>phant0mas: what kernel do you need to write the drivers for? Linux?

<mark_weaver>I guess that Linux Device Drivers <https://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/> is probably a good resource, but it's quite out-of-date. Linux is evolving very quickly, and in practice driver authors just have to keep up on the changes to the internal APIs incrementally.

<mark_weaver>what kind of device are you writing a driver for?

<ggrant>Is it possible to generate a somewhat practical vm now? I'm stuck on Fedora 20 and I want to contribute, but due to some Fedora centric stuff I can't get it installed.

<ggrant>Well I can, but I can't set up the build users group and the like.

<phant0mas>mark_weaver: for the arm zedboard running linux

<phant0mas>I am reading Linux Device Drivers

<mark_weaver>ggrant: what difficulty did you run into creating the build users group and users?

<mark_weaver>I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to get Guix running on Fedora 20.

<ggrant>mark_weaver: Since Fedora moved everything to bin, calling some of the commands to make it.

<ggrant>I can try the install again, one sec.

<mark_weaver>ggrant: one thing: I recommend passing --system to useradd. we fixed that in the manual in git master, but it's not in the manual of the most recent release (0.5)

<mark_weaver>(that makes it so that the build users won't show up in the graphical login window)

<ggrant>mark_weaver: Well now, I'm not even getting to that point. When running the bootstrap, I get "autoreconf: running: /usr/bin/autoconf --force configure.ac:51: error: possibly undefined macro: PKG_CHECK_MODULES If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow. See the Autoconf documentation."

<zerwas>I think I had the same error recently. Unfortunately I can't remember the solution. Maybe it was running libtoolize

<mark_weaver>ggrant: it's easier if you initially build from a tarball instead of from git.

<mark_weaver>then you don't have to run bootstrap

*ggrant should've just stayed on his Parabola install.

<mark_weaver>but fwiw, the problem there is probably that pkg-config wasn't installed when you ran bootstrap.

<ggrant>mark_weaver: It was. :^P

<mark_weaver>well, maybe there's some kind of pkg-config-devel package or something, for fedora.

<ggrant>mark_weaver: Doesn't look like it. :^P

<mark_weaver>on my system, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro is defined in /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4

<mark_weaver>do you have that file on your system?

<mark_weaver>it's part of pkg-config.

<ggrant>Yup.

<mark_weaver>where is it located on your system?

<ggrant>mark_weaver: */usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4

<mark_weaver>strange. that should be in the default path where the autotools look. well, for now, you could: export ACLOCAL_PATH=/usr/share/aclocal and try running bootstrap again.

*mark_weaver suspects that either the fedora autotools are configured to look in the wrong place, or that their pkg-config package is installing pkg.m4 in the wrong place. somehow, those two things are lining up.

<mark_weaver>s/are/aren't/

<mark_weaver>maybe breakage from the recent /usr/bin -> /bin change.

<mark_weaver>do you have a /share/aclocal directory on your system, with files in it?

<ggrant>Just /share? I have no root directory called /share.

<ggrant>Also the aclocal thing worked.

<mark_weaver>good!

<ggrant>Not sure how/if the group adding will work, though. :^P

<mark_weaver>why do you think it wouldn't?

<ggrant>mark_weaver: I've tried it before, and it didn't.

<mark_weaver>well, please try again and tell me the details of what happened, and we'll work through it.

<ggrant>Will do.

<ggrant>Yeah, it can't find useradd.

<ggrant>Found it in /usr/sbin/useradd

<ggrant>May have got it.

<mark_weaver>cool!

<ggrant>mark_weaver: Yup, thanks! Grabbing glibc now. :^)

<mark_weaver>excellent :)

<ggrant>Yah, now maybe I can start contributing weekly. Still need/want to package feh, scrot, rtorrent, mypaint, and a few others.

<mark_weaver>that would be most welcome!

<davexunit>ggrant: feh and scrot would be handy. :)

<davexunit>I'm just starting to get back into writing packages.

<davexunit>seems that guix is rebuilding all of the bootstrap stuff right now...

<mark_weaver>it might have been a while since your last build :)

<mark_weaver>s/might/must/

<davexunit>yes it has

<mark_weaver>I've recently switched to using Guix programs (almost) exclusively from within my user session. e.g. PATH contains only ~/.guix-profile/bin and no system paths.

<davexunit>that's on my list of things to do.

<mark_weaver>and it's amazing how much that motivates me to write/improve packages that I need.

<mark_weaver>hence the recent flood of patches from me.

<davexunit>yeah that's exactly why I want to do it. I just haven't had the time to get everything configured.

<phant0mas>when I find some time I will package some avr programming tools for my arduino

<davexunit>is there any prior art for building URLs to package tarballs where the URL path contains some fragment of the version number in it?

<davexunit>for instance, the URL for the latest mpd tarball is http://musicpd.org/download/mpd/0.18/mpd-0.18.8.tar.gz"

<mark_weaver>davexunit: the way I do it is: (string-join (take (string-split version #\\.) 2) ".")

<mark_weaver>for example in my gmime package in mail.scm

<davexunit>nice! thanks.

<davexunit>I forgot about take.

<mark_weaver>you need to import (srfi srfi-1)

<davexunit>yup.

<mark_weaver>ah, it would be nice to have mpd, indeed!

<mark_weaver>I've never gotten in the habit of using that, but I'd like to switch to it.

<davexunit>I recently setup mpd to work with emms and it's quite nice.

<mark_weaver>sgtm!

*ggrant is attempting a nap. Peace, for now people.

*ggrant is AFK.

<mark_weaver>ggrant: sleep well!

<davexunit>mpd has a nice architecture. in addition to the emms client, I run another client that just "scrobbles" the songs I play to libre.fm

<mark_weaver>indeed, its architecture is the major draw for me.

<phant0mas>mark_weaver: I was about writing the gnumach recipe and then make the gnumach-headers inherit most of the info from it

<phant0mas>I was thinking*

<phant0mas>what do you think?

<mark_weaver>fwiw, the 'linux-libre-headers' and 'linux-libre' packages don't inherit from each other.

<phant0mas>that's why I am asking

<phant0mas>so better not eh?

<mark_weaver>here's one thing to keep in mind: it might be preferable to update 'gnumach' more often than 'mach-headers'

<phant0mas>understood :-)

<davexunit>yay, mpd builds now. just missing all the bells and whistles

<mark_weaver>because updating 'mach-headers' will require the entire system to be rebuilt, but hopefully 'gnumach' can be upgraded without requiring that.

<mark_weaver>davexunit: in guix, you mean?

<davexunit>mark_weaver: yeah.

<davexunit>my recipe is working.

<phant0mas>I was also thinking about using git-fetch for the gnumach, there are a lot of bugfixes not in the tarball versionm

<phant0mas>what about that?

<mark_weaver>davexunit: sweet!

<mark_weaver>phant0mas: mmm, dunno. I suspect that civodul would prefer to stick with tarball releases, but who knows?

<phant0mas>I will do some experimenting on the git version

<phant0mas>and I will ask ludo as well

<mark_weaver>okay

<phant0mas>I <3 guix :-)

<davexunit>it really is a pretty pleasant experience to write guix packages. for most packages, anyway.

<mark_weaver>agreed!

<davexunit>how do you force a package to be rebuilt?

<mark_weaver>well, if you made any changes, it will be rebuilt automatically.

<davexunit>mpd built fine, but I lost the output of its configure script and I want to see the optional dependencies that I missed.

<davexunit>okay

<mark_weaver>davexunit: cd $PREFIX/var/log/nix/drvs; ls -ltr */* | tail

<mark_weaver>those are the log files of your most recent builds.

<mark_weaver>or in this case, ls -ltd */*-mpd-* | tail

<mark_weaver>sorry, ls -ltrd */*-mpd-* | tail

<mark_weaver>(forgot the -r)

<davexunit>thanks!

<mark_weaver>going offline for a bit, happy hacking!

<davexunit>see ya!

<mark_weaver>welcome :)

<ggrant>Hm, imlib2 is "checking for X" ... not sure what should be an input here besides libxext, which is listed as the only x dependency I can find.

IRC channel logs

2014-02-23.log