Subject: bug#66537: configure: error: The Guile bindings of GnuTLS are missing

From: Hiep Pham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:28:09 +0000

Hi Daniel,

On 10/17/23 10:59, Daniel Meißner wrote:
> Hi Hiep,
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm on Fedora and started a shell with:
>>
>> ```
>> guix shell -D guix help2man git strace --pure
>> ```
>>
>> And then:
>>
>> ```
>> ./bootstrap
>> ./configure --localstatedir=/var
>> ```
>>
>> And it showed me this error:
>>
>> ```
>> [snip]
>> checking for guile-3.0 >= 3.0.3... yes
>> checking for guile-3.0... yes
>> checking if (gnutls) is available... no
>> configure: error: The Guile bindings of GnuTLS are missing; please
>> install them.
>> ```
> 
> Have you installed Guile 3.0 via Fedora’s package manager also?  Then
> maybe configure finds Fedora’s Guile where Guile-GnuTLS is not
> installed.  You could try using a container to confirm:
> 
> guix shell -C -D guix help2man git strace
> 
> Then try again:
> 
> ./bootstrap
> ./configure --localstatedir=/var

Running `guix shell -C -D guix help2man git strace --pure` in a 
container solved my problem! Thanks.

> When this works configure is probably finding the wrong Guile binary.
> Alternatively look into the file config.status which is generated by
> configure for a line like
> 
> S["GUILE"]="/path/to/guile"
> 
> This shows which Guile binary is found.

I followed this contributing guide [1] in the manual. It might be 
helpful to update the documentation to run the shell in an isolated 
container.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/guix.html#Building-from-Git

-- 
Hiep