Re: git guix checkout automation for contributors

[zimoun]

Hi,

I am late to the party. :-)

On Sat, 01 Oct 2022 at 19:18, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> skribis:
>
>> (1) Install the guix system
>> (2) Log in as regular user
>> (3) guix edit nano
>> (4) It opens a file from /gnu/store that you cannot edit.
>
> At one point, I thought we could have, say:
>
>   guix edit --clone PKG
>
> It would close the channel containing PKG, open the file that defines
> it, and then tell you to run “guix build -L … PKG” to test your changes.
>
> All this would be relatively easy to implement, but it has one downside:
> it doesn’t work for the ‘guix’ channel.
>
> Perhaps we could make it work for the ‘guix’ channel if we arrange so
> that “guix build -L … PKG” doesn’t end up loading all the local
> uncompiled guix/*.scm modules.

Well, does it need to be a Git clone?  Or can it just be a simple copy?

Because using a simple copy, we could imagine,

    guix edit --from=PKG --to=DIRECTORY

that extracts the PKG package definition, filling the required
’#:use-module’s and so ready for “guix build -L DIRECTORY PKG”.

On the other hand, a Git clone would allow to prepare a patch almost
ready for submission.


Cheers,
simon