Subject: [bug#60636] [PATCH] Add 'manifest.scm'

From: Brian Cully <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:18:18 -0500

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> This is intended for the Shepherd repository, right?

Yes. The shepherd documentation pointed me to the Guix ML and 
bugtracker. If there’s somewhere better, I can re-submit.

> The value this provides above 'guix shell -D shepherd' is that 
> it
> includes the build system bootstrapping packages too (autoconf,
> automake, etc.), right?

That’s correct. Shepherd can’t be built from a checkout using 
‘guix shell -D shepherd’ because (according to Ludo) Guix uses the 
tarball as a source, not the git repository. Ludo did mention on 
IRC that shepherd could probably use a manifest.scm when I asked 
him about it, but I don’t want to speak for him more than that.

> Are all these items really needed?  Why do we
> need GCC, or glibc or gettext for example?

I added every item in response to one of the build steps 
failing. GCC is needed, for instance, because configure tests for 
the existence of a working C compiler (probably because of 
etc/crash-handler.c, but I couldn’t say for sure), glibc is needed 
because we’ve got a C compiler in the mix, and gettext is needed 
for ‘autoconf-point’.

-bjc