HACKING


1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

-*- mode: org; coding: utf-8; -*-

#+TITLE: Hacking GNU Guix and Its Incredible Distro

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
Copyright © 2015, 2017 Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@gnu.org>
Copyright © 2017 Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
Copyright © 2017 Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net>

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

* Contributing

See the manual for useful hacking information, either by running

  info -f doc/guix.info "Contributing"

or by checking the [[https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Contributing.html][web copy of the manual]].
-*- mode: org; coding: utf-8; -*-

#+TITLE: What's left to do?
#+STARTUP: content hidestars

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2014 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
Copyright © 2019 Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe@gmail.com>

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

* MAYBE Add a substituter that uses the GNUnet DHT or [[http://libswift.org][libswift]]

Would be neat if binaries could be pushed to and pulled from the GNUnet DHT or
rather libswift (since DHTs aren’t suited for large payloads).  Guix users
would sign their binaries, and define which binaries they trust.

Use UPnP and similar to traverse NAT, like ‘filegive’ does.

* user interface
** add guile-ncurses interface

* extend <package>
** add ‘recommends’ field

For instance, glibc, binutils, gcc, and ld-wrapper would recommend each other.
‘guix package -i’ could ask interactively (?), or allow users to follow all or
none of the recommendations.

** add a ‘user-environment-hook’

This should specify builder code to be run when building a user
environment with ‘guix-package’.  For instance, Texinfo’s hook would
create a new ‘dir’.

** extend ‘propagated-build-inputs’ with support for multiple outputs

#+BEGIN_SRC scheme
  (outputs '("out" "include"))
  (propagated-build-inputs
    `(((("i1" ,p1 "o1")
        ("i2" ,p2))
       => "include")
      ("i3" ,p3)))
#+END_SRC

* synchronize non-GNU package descriptions with the [[http://directory.fsf.org][FSD]]

Meta-data for GNU packages, including descriptions and synopses, can be
dumped from the FSD:
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=GNU/Export&action=purge .
We could periodically synchronize with that.

* add a guildhall build system

The Guildhall is Guile’s packaging system.  It should be easy to add a
‘guildhall-build-system’ that does the right thing based on guildhall
recipes.

* union

Support sophisticated collision handling when building a union: honor
per-package priorities, etc.

* add GUIX_ALLOW_EXPENSIVE_TESTS

Tests that need to download stuff or otherwise take a long time would only be
run when that is defined.

* guix build utils
** MAYBE Change ‘ld-wrapper’ to add RPATH for libs passed by file name

** MAYBE Add equivalent to chrpath that uses [[https://gitorious.org/guile-dlhacks/guile-dlhacks/][guile-dlhacks]]

** MAYBE Add a hash-rewriting thing for deep dependency replacement without rebuild

See [[https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d1662d715514e6ef9d3dc29f132f1b3d8e608a18][Shea Levy's `replace-dependency' in Nixpkgs]].

* distro
** port to GNU/Hurd, aka. ‘i686-gnu’

Problems include that current glibc releases do not build on GNU/Hurd.
In addition, there haven’t been stable releases of GNU Mach, MiG, and
Hurd, which would be a pre-condition.

* Installer
** Fix impossibility to restart on error after cow-store has been started
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-12/msg00161.html.
- Force reboot upon installer failure
- Unshare the installer process
- Run the installer process in a separate namespace
** Partitioning
*** Add RAID support
*** Add more partitioning schemes
The actual schemes are taken from Debian Installer but some are not
implemented yet: like "Separate partitions for /home /var and /tmp".
*** Replace wait page "Partition formating is in progress, please wait"
Create a new waiting page describing what's being done:

[              20%              ]
Running mkfs.ext4 on /dev/sda2 ...

[              40%              ]
Running mkfs.ext4 on /dev/sda3 ...
*** Add a confirmation page before formating/partitioning
** Desktop environments
*** Allow for no desktop environments
Propose to choose between "headless server" and "lightweight X11" in a new
page.
*** Add services selection feature
Add a services page to the configuration. Ask for services to be installed
like SSH, bluetooth, TLP in a checkbox list?
** Locale and keymap
*** Try to guess user locale and keymap by probing BIOS or HW (dmidecode)
** Timezone
*** Regroup everything in one single page
Under the form:
(UTC + 1) Europe/Paris
(UTC + 2) Africa/Cairo
...
** Display issue
*** Investigate display issue described here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-01/msg00305.html