IRC channel logs

<CaptainLex>Hello all!

<Steap>well, I was about to go to sleep, but hi!

<CaptainLex>Hello Steap! I was going to ask you a bit about the project, but I can wait until tomorrow!

<Steap>well

<Steap>go on

<Steap>I'm waiting for "apt-get upgrade" to finish.

<CaptainLex>What I wonder the most about the project is why exactly it would take three months

<CaptainLex>(or however long)

<Steap>well

<Steap>we're talking about packaging a huge DE

<Steap>not a simple WM

<CaptainLex>No no I know that now

<CaptainLex>Obviously that involves more work

<Steap>so basically, it will require packaging graphics toolkit, such as GTK+ or Qt

<Steap>it will require support for whatever languages the project use (Vala, for instance)

<Steap>we probably will have to decide how to support certain features

<Steap>for example, the OpenBSD folks find it hard to package Gnome because some of its components require systemd

<Steap>and they obviously do not want to use systemd

<CaptainLex>Hmmmmmm

<CaptainLex>I seeee

<Steap>since we do notreally want that either

<Steap>how are we going to do ?

<CaptainLex>These are interesting questions!

<Steap>The work itself isn't so hard, I guess

<CaptainLex>Wait, what's wrong with systemd?

<Steap>You'd mostly have to know how much of a DE you want to package

<Steap>what steps you're gonna have to take (basically, where t ostart, where to go from there)

<Steap>and make decisions about stuff like systemd

<Steap>well, it's almost 2am for me, so I don't feel like trolling

<CaptainLex>Hahaha

<Steap>but well, some people just do not want to use systemd as their init system

<CaptainLex>True, true

<Steap>and I think civodul is not really found of it

<CaptainLex>Gotcha

<Steap>I think he's working on a Guile way of doing this kind of stuff :)

<Steap>but well, systemd is just an example

<CaptainLex>Well, I'll let you sleep! I'll start using Guix tonight and investigate packaging something simple

<CaptainLex>if only I could find the source for sl :D

<Steap>I don't really know what kind of technologies are used in modern DEs

<Steap>sl = ?

<CaptainLex>sl is a prank command-line utility

<Steap>oh

<Steap>yeah sure, I know it

<Steap>I mistype "ls" a lot.

<CaptainLex>Haha

<CaptainLex>Then it would be good for Guix to have it! xD

<Steap>Homepage: http://www.tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~toyoda/index_e.html

<Steap>from the Debian package

<CaptainLex>Thanks!

<CaptainLex>Maybe that and the pipe cow

<CaptainLex>Those seem fairly simple

<Steap>nice

<Steap>do you know how to use git ?

<Steap>Especially to send patches

<CaptainLex>I use git as personal source control, but never more than that

<Steap>well, packaging sl should be easy

<Steap>once you've done it

<Steap>git add Makefile.am gnu/packages/sl.scm

<Steap>git commit

<Steap>git format-patch -1

<Steap>git send-email --to bug-guix@gnu.org 0001-xxx.patch

<Steap>then we'll review the patch on the mailing list

<CaptainLex>Awesome, thanks!

<CaptainLex>I gotta restart x, brb

<CaptainLex>Have a good night if you're gone when I'm back!

<mark_weaver>Did GNOME actually decide to require systemd? Which component requires it?

<Steap>mark_weaver: I don't really, I stopped using Gnome quite a long time ago

<Steap>but the BSD people seem to have trouble with it

<Steap> https://lwn.net/Articles/524612/

<CaptainLex>I haven't used a full DE in a while; but it surprises that systemd is so controversial, since arch comes with it

<CaptainLex>and arch tries to be as uncontroversial as they can!

<CaptainLex>Is there anyone around? I have a few questions about the Guix daemon

<CaptainLex>I'm getting an error trying to build a package that the guix-builder group has no members, even though $groups guix-builder1 outputs guix-builder

<mark_weaver>I have a vague recollection that you might need to make 'guix-builder' the primary group of each of the 'guix-builder*' users, by putting its group ID in the fourth field of /etc/passwd

<CaptainLex>Hmmmmm, intriguing, thank you!

<mark_weaver>np!

<CaptainLex>Hmmm, looks like it already is though. Darn niche alpha software

<CaptainLex>My normal approach is useless here

<CaptainLex>:P

<mark_weaver>it already is what?

<mark_weaver>what do you mean by your normal approach?

<CaptainLex>The fourth field of /etc/passwd is already the gid of guix-builder, and my normal approach is Google

<CaptainLex>This place is Google for Guix :P

<mark_weaver>CaptainLex: oh, so maybe the problem is the other way around. does the 'guix-builder' line in /etc/group contain the names of all the 'guix-builder*' users?

<mark_weaver>if not, I suggest adding them.

<CaptainLex>Aha! Not at all

<CaptainLex>haha indeed :)

<CaptainLex>Thanks again!

<mark_weaver>no problem!

<CaptainLex>Hahaha all the depencies of the first install

<CaptainLex>So to verify behavior here

<CaptainLex>I installed guix, setup the daemon, turned it on

<CaptainLex>did guix package -i hello

<CaptainLex>and it's been installing various packages (I caught a glimpse of make, linux-libre, and perl) for like half an hour

<CaptainLex>is this installing dependencies, and it's just installing a bunch because they're system dependencies?

<youlysses>CaptainLex: It looks like it's installing the whole of the "distro" right now.

<CaptainLex>Interesting. Why might this be?

<youlysses>CaptainLex: I haven't done an install until right after, 0.1 came out... but it might be a bug. I don't know why the default behavior would be to bootstrap the whole of the custom distro. :-U

<CaptainLex>Hahaha nor would I

<CaptainLex>So is there a preferred way of stopping an install? Ctrl-C would do the trick, but is there something preferred?

<youlysses>CaptainLex: Killing it via a system-call like that should be find... though I don't know if any event code has been written yet to handle it. :-U I'm not the most knowledgeable, tbh... (Sorry!) :-/

<youlysses>*fine

<CaptainLex>youlysses: That's fine! We'll discover together!

<youlysses>:-3

<CaptainLex>youlysses: I have discovered that when you tried to installing it again, it picks up where it left off when I killed it

<CaptainLex>:O

<CaptainLex>This is magic

<CaptainLex>install*

<youlysses>:-)

<CaptainLex>youlysses: Apropos of little

<CaptainLex>is the per-user, unprivileged install capability of nix and guix a special feature of consequence of the functional design?

<CaptainLex>Or is it just an unrelated decision?

<youlysses>CaptainLex: Again, no expert -- but I believe an unrelated decision.

<mark_weaver>Guix does not use any libraries or compilers from your host distro. it is completely independent.

<mark_weaver>so it has to start out by bootstrapping the toolchain and all needed libraries from scratch.

<CaptainLex>mark_weaver: I thought as much, but the packages I saw being installed seemed unnecessary. Luckily, due to the aforementioned magic I am no worse off for having killed it~

<mark_weaver>well, guix itself is built using libraries (and guile) from your host system.. but the actual things that are built in guix are completely independent.

<mark_weaver>what seemed unnecessary?

<mark_weaver>remember that the goal is for guix to be a whole distro, like nixos.

<CaptainLex>Indeed! I'm quite excited!

<CaptainLex>I don't know why Perl was included, for one

<CaptainLex>(although it will make packaging cowsay easier!)

<mark_weaver>it was probably needed by the build system of something that *is* needed.

<CaptainLex>Mmmmm

<CaptainLex>Of course, build system

<youlysses>CaptainLex: It's more-or-less going to be the "official GNU system" and a lot of GNU tools require 3rd party software to some-degree as mark_weaver pointed out. :-P

<CaptainLex>Indeed

<CaptainLex>So I suppose as far as that goes, GNOME is the most appropriate DE to package by default

<youlysses>CaptainLex: More-than-likely, yes.

<youlysses>To my knowledge, xorg nor wayland has been packaged yet, though.

<CaptainLex>Hmm

<CaptainLex>Also, it means bash

<CaptainLex>But one day I'll see a fully-interactive Scheme shell

<CaptainLex>:

<mark_weaver>what do you mean by "it means bash"

<mark_weaver>?

<mark_weaver>Guix is not just GNU software. Vim is included, for example :)

<mark_weaver>but it's certainly in its early stages.

<mark_weaver>it will be a lot of work to make it bootable, and a lot more work to get an entire modern DE like GNOME in.

<CaptainLex>Morning Guixs!

<Steap>Morning!

<CaptainLex>Steap: while my Guix distro is installing its first big grip of packages, I have a couple questions about how to handle packaging sl

<Steap>CaptainLex: go on

<Steap>CaptainLex: shoot :)

<CaptainLex>Haha sorry, my computer's been locking up recently (???)

<CaptainLex>Well, sl is built using a single traditional makefile

<CaptainLex>(and is not installed - the readme tells you to put the result in /usr/local/bin manually!)

<CaptainLex>So what should I put for the build-system?

<Steap>I think you should use the GNU build system

<Steap>You'll just have to do (alist-remove 'configure %standard-phases)

<Steap>so that "./configure" is not run

<CaptainLex>Hmm, okay!

<Steap>and you will have to define the install phase yourself

<CaptainLex>Is there a different guide than the example in the main documentation for package definition? Or should I check out the source for some others?

<Steap>there is no other documentation

<Steap>I suggest you take a look at some of the gnu/packages/*.scm files :)

<CaptainLex>Okay, cool

<CaptainLex>The (alist-remove) you told me to add

<CaptainLex>is that a full argument by itself, or it is passed to build-system?

<CaptainLex>Morning youlysses!

<Steap>CaptainLex: it's a function defined by guix

<Steap>well, taht's alist-delete

<Steap>See lua.scm, for instance

<CaptainLex>Ah, okay! Thanks!

<CaptainLex>Student proposal opens soon! Gah I need to hurry up! :P

<youlysses>CaptainLex: More like noon, here, but thanks. :-)

<CaptainLex>youlysses: Well, any time someone goes from -Zzz to normal, it's morning ;)

<CaptainLex>So Steap, I'm thinking I'll be targeting GNOME in my proposal

<CaptainLex>I know it's huge and all, but it seems appropriate to package another GNU project

<Steap>ok

<Steap>well, that'll be fun :)

<CaptainLex>I hope so!

<CaptainLex>I have obligations for the rest of the day, so I'm hoping to get sl packaged and on the mailing list Monday or Tuesday

<CaptainLex>Then cowsay after that (thanks, whoever packaged Perl 5 already!)

<CaptainLex>Then I'll probably be in a better position to talk about the real proposal

<Steap>ok

<Steap>looking forward to reading your patches!

<CaptainLex>Thanks!

<CaptainLex>Anyway, I have to go into Windows for a bit... :'(

<CaptainLex>I'll catch you cats on the flipside!

<CaptainLex>Afternoon everyone!

<civodul>hello!

<CaptainLex>Hello civodul! I'm working on my first Guix package!

<civodul>aah, great!

<civodul>let us know if you need help

<civodul>did you pass "make check" already?

<CaptainLex>What's that?

<CaptainLex>(And I'm still in the research phase)

<civodul>usually, you would run ./configure && make && make check when getting a source tarball

<civodul>like that of Guix

<CaptainLex>Do you mean after I cloned the guix repo, make check on guix itself?

<civodul>after clone, you must first run ./bootstrap

<civodul>the ./configure && make && make check

<civodul>*then

<CaptainLex>Ah, I see

<CaptainLex>Ahhhh yes I did! I installed it, though I had difficulty installing any packages

<civodul>make sure to report details on the list :-)

<CaptainLex>I will as soon as I can decide whether it's really a bug :P

<CaptainLex>Immediately after installing, I attempted to install hello, and it spent like half an hour installing packages like linux-libre and perl, which seemed to me like those could justifiably be dependencies of the distro as a whole, and then before it finished my computer froze, which it's been doing lately (I believe quite unrelated to guix)

<CaptainLex>(I may have installed a sillier, brokener version of gcc that's leaking memory a few days ago)

<Steap>I think Guix installs quite a lot of things the first time

<CaptainLex>Excellent

<CaptainLex>I'm going to resume the install now

<CaptainLex>If I disappear, it's 'cause I froze again!

<civodul>hope it's just the computer that freezes ;-)

<CaptainLex>I don't know, civodul, here in Minnesota we had twelve inches of snow three days ago

<CaptainLex>You can never tell!

<CaptainLex>So currently when guix receives improper syntax, it backtraces, yes?

<civodul>snow, woow

<civodul>yes, well Guile

<civodul>there's no "backtrace" if it's a syntax error

<CaptainLex>And plans for more helpful error messages are presumably for a version later than 0.1?

<civodul>that concerns Guile, not Guix

<civodul>but i'm not sure it could do much better

<civodul>well, it depends

<civodul>do you have a specific example?

<CaptainLex>I mean, I'm referring to passing aruments to the command line

<civodul>ah, ok

<civodul>and more specifically?

<CaptainLex>Well, for instance, guix package -i without any arguments

<civodul>ERROR: In procedure args-fold: Missing required argument after `-i'

<civodul>and a backtrace

<civodul>which is arguably suboptimal

<civodul>that's what you get too, right?

<CaptainLex>Yep!

<civodul>ok

<civodul>:-)

<civodul>CaptainLex: BTW did you talk with Steap about packaging GNOME for GSoC?

<CaptainLex>Yeah, we touched on it this morning.

<CaptainLex>I've definitelt decided on GNOME for philosophical and personal reasons

<CaptainLex>But I'm going to make a few small packages first to get a hang of it

<civodul>ok

<civodul>yes, makes sense

<CaptainLex>I'm starting of with sl, the train that trolls people who mistype ls

<CaptainLex>off*

<CaptainLex>then fortune and cowsay

<civodul>:-)

<CaptainLex>But before that can happen, I'm getting Guix set up and reading existing package recipes

<civodul>sure

<CaptainLex>gcc takes a while to install :P

<Steap>funny how the binary subtituter doesn't help

<Steap>CaptainLex: are you on an x86_64 machine ?

<CaptainLex>My processor is, but I can never remember which version of arch I installed

<CaptainLex>In other words: possibly!

<civodul>CaptainLex: if you use /nix/store as the store directory, it should be able to download pre-built binaries

<civodul>see the recent threads on the mailing list

<CaptainLex>I am using /nix/store. I'm getting a buil error 977 into installing gcc

<CaptainLex>Specifically, a linker error

<civodul>hmm

<civodul>from Guix master?

<CaptainLex>As in, what branch do I have installed?

<civodul>yes

<CaptainLex>Yes indeed

<civodul>ok

<civodul>could you post all the details on bug-guix?

<civodul>including the architecture, the command you typed in, Guile version, and last 30 lines of the build log

<civodul>roughly ;-)

<CaptainLex>Sure thing :)

<CaptainLex>Sent!

<civodul>thanks!

<civodul>crap, Emacs crash!

<Steap>damn,your OS crashed

<CaptainLex>Hahx2

<CaptainLex>Hahax2*

<Steap>I have no idea why your build fails

<Steap>what do you call "Guix branch master, v.2" ?

<CaptainLex>oops

<CaptainLex>I mean I built from the git master branch

<CaptainLex>and running guix --version returns 0.2

<Steap>oh ok

<Steap>I don't think it has anything to do with Guile 2.1.0

<CaptainLex>I'm also not confident that 2.1 is what it's calling, as 2.0.7 is also installed

<CaptainLex>Time for me to get ready for work

<CaptainLex>Have a wonderful day, everyone!

<Steap>you too!

IRC channel logs

2013-04-21.log