Subject: Re: [bug#73937] [PATCH]: Update Nyxt to 3.12.0

From: André A. Gomes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:33:04 +0300

Guillaume Le Vaillant <[email-masked]> writes:

> André A. Gomes <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> Hello Guix,
>>
>> Attached, thanks.
>>
>> Please note that I am one of the Nyxt developers.  The changes reflect
>> that fact that the Lisp dependencies are pinned as git submodules.  The
>> tests are temporarily disabled since they fail due to undocumented
>> exported symbols (which is unreasonable).  I only noticed it after the
>> release, but I'll fix it for the next release.
>
> Hi.
> We usually try to avoid taking libraries from git submodules unless the
> software can't be made to compile with system libraries.
> Can't Nyxt 3.12.0 work with the libraries packaged in Guix?

Nyxt pins Common Lisp libraries versions as to ensure everything works
as expected.  Concretely, there's an issue related to sbcl-alexandria
since the commit Guix is using breaks Nyxt's functionality (see [1]).

You may argue that a sbcl-alexandria variant could be defined (see [2]),
but it seems brittle from Nyxt's perspective and probably undesirable
from Guix's perspective.

All package managers are using the git submodules to build Nyxt,
including Nix.  From Nyxt's perspective, any build that won't use the
pinned CL libraries versions isn't Nyxt per se, but a custom build (or
perhaps a "variation" in Guix's parlance).

Happy to know your thoughts.

[1] https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/issues/3503
[2] https://github.com/aadcg/aadcg-guix-channel/blob/284a62f30b91642b08a66d02679611655d0bfb51/packages/aadcg-nyxt.scm#L20

-- 
André A. Gomes
"You cannot even find the ruins..."