Re: Breaking the loop with php's composer

[Joshua Branson]

Mája Tomášek <maya.tomasek@disroot.org> writes:

> 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

Certainly give that a try!

> 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)

You could always use git to travel back in composer's time, to a time
when composer did not use compuser to build itself.  I think that is how
to package jquery currently.  We just use a really old makefile and have
an outdated jquery package.

> 3. phar archives are actually acceptable in guix distribution, it
> doesn't need to be built from source (i doubt this is the case)

You are correct.  Guix perfers that we build everything from source.

Best of luck!
>
> Thank you all for any help.
>
> With wishes of great wednesday,
> Maya