Using Guix for development with gysela

The purpose of this small guide is to set-up a development environment for gyselalibxx, by using Guix.

GNU Guix is a package management tool for and distribution of the GNU system. Guix makes it easy for unprivileged users to install, upgrade, or remove software packages, to roll back to a previous package set, to build packages from source, and generally assists with the creation and maintenance of software environments.

Guix Manual

Part A: Development on machines without Guix

This requires a machine that creates the repack that has Guix.

A regular Guix installation stores its files in /gnu/store. In machines where this is not possible, we can pack our dependencies without much problem.

In this example I am deployung to Jean-Zay.

$ HOST=jean-zay.idris.fr
$ WORK=/gpfswork/rech/jpz/ueg37cx

Creating pack

We use guix pack to create a tarball containing all the development dependencies. The dependencies are specified in the manifest.scm, which contains the development dependencies, and some other things.

$ guix time-machine -C ./channels.locked.scm -q -- \
       pack --format=tarball -r pack.tar.gz -R -S /bin=bin -S /etc=etc -m ./manifest.scm

Copy pack and unpack

You can send the tarball to the host by any means, for example with scp.

It is important to unpack the tarball in a FS with high limit of inodes.

$ scp pack.tar.gz $HOST:$WORK
$ ssh $HOST
(jean-zay) $ cd $WORK
(jean-zay) $ tar -xvf ...tar.gz

Getting shell

To enter the shell where all the dependencies are available, run the following command:

(jean-zay) $ ./bin/bash --rcfile ./etc/profile

Building

(jean-zay) $ cmake \
               -B build \
               -DGYSELALIBXX_DEPENDENCY_POLICIES=INSTALLED \
               -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
....

Appendix 1: Channels file

For this example, instead of using globally-defined channels, the channels are provided in a declarative manifest channels.locked.scm.

This channels.locked.scm contains specific commits for guix, and is derived from the channels.scm with the following command:

guix time-machine -C ./channels.scm -q -- \
     describe -f channels > channels.locked.scm

viperML / gysela-guix