Re: Issue with 'guix shell' for Guile projects on non-Guix distros

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Here's the context: Someone wants to build guile-goblins from a Git
> checkout using their non-Guix, FHS distro. However, they happen to
> have Guile 3 installed to /usr via the host distro's package manager.

I was going to suggest running ‘guix shell --check …’, which can detect
a class of problems on non-Guix distros, but that’s not the problem
here.

> They install Guix, run 'guix shell', then './bootstrap.sh' and that
> all works fine. Then they run './configure' and this happens:

[...]

> The most important line above is:
>
>     checking for guile-3.0... /usr/bin/guile-3.0
>
> Guile's guile.m4 code checks for a 'guile-3.0' executable *before*
> checking for a 'guile' executable.  Guix's Guile package only provides
> 'guile', but the host distro provides 'guile-3.0'.  Unfortunately, the
> build environment ends up as a mix of host distro and Guix things
> which eventually proves fatal to the build.

I’ve not encountered this before.

My suggestion would be to recommend running ‘guix shell -CP’ as this
addresses problems of that sort once and for all.  I do that, even on
Guix System: it’s pretty reassuring to know that your dev environment is
isolated from the rest.

Alternatively, ‘guix shell --pure’ would also address that because then
‘configure’ wouldn’t look for programs under /usr/bin.  It’s less robust
though.

HTH,
Ludo’.