Breaking the loop with php's composer

[Mája Tomášek]

Hi,

Since I want to deploy roundcube on my guix machine, I was recently
looking into packaging composer (https://getcomposer.org/) which
is a dependency manager for PHP.

First it looked like it will be a simple task! Simply download the
installer. But! The installer was actually just a downloader for a .phar
archive. Why do you need a downloader for an archive in a repo?

So time to reverse engineer the archive. How to build it. Okay, now I
encountered a build script from
https://github.com/composer/getcomposer.org/blob/main/update.sh, but!
Another hickup. This script relies on composer! So you cannot build
composer without having composer! It's dotnet all over.

So I came to you, what should I do now? Here are my options:

1. contact the developers and hope they will help me
2. reverse engineer and build composer inside guix from scratch (as guix needs 
to install
dependencies outside of package managers and it'll still need to
circumvent the composer's download phase)
3. phar archives are actually acceptable in guix distribution, it
doesn't need to be built from source (i doubt this is the case)

Thank you all for any help.

With wishes of great wednesday,
Maya