Re: Current state of cargo-build-system

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Ivan,

Ivan Petkov <address@hidden> skribis:

> I'm new to both Guix and Guile/Scheme and decided to get my feet wet by
> attempting to package a non-trivial Rust crate into Guix.

Cool, thanks for getting in touch!

> This seems like something others have tried before me with varying degrees of
> success (I found this thread from a few years ago which doesn't seem to have
> resolved in any way 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-01/msg00306.html 
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-01/msg00306.html>).
> I ran into a host of issues myself, but I was able to prototype some changes
> which allowed me to make some progress. Happy to keep hacking on this, but
> ultimately I need some insight/guidance on the proper ways to build this out 
> in
> Guix :)

I think Danny and maybe ng0 (Cc’d) may be those the most familiar with
Rust in Guix.

> But before I propose any new changes, I wanted to check, what is the current
> state cargo/crates in Guix from a community perspective?
>
> Are there any philosophical or technical blockers that preclude pulling in
> packages from crates.io, or is it just a matter of chipping away at the 
> problem?

I don’t think there are any “philosophical” blockers: as long as this is
free software, which I believe is the case for most packages on
crates.io, there shouldn’t be any problems.

As for the technical issues, I don’t know.  I remember David Craven, who
wrote ‘guix import crate’, didn’t do a mass import back then, but then
the ‘rust’ package in Guix was also nascent at the time so perhaps there
were other problems that have been resolved since then.

Anyway, I think you can go ahead and start experimenting, adding new
packages, etc.  Let us know how it goes, and do ping Danny and ng0 as
needed!  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.