Re: Debugging Guix packages?

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> Jookia <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> It'd be a nice feature to have where I could step through the build process 
>> in
>> an environment close to the actual build and run build commands myself like
>> 'patch' or 'make' or 'configure', but builders can also include Guile code.
>
> We already have “guix environment --{pure,container} pkg” which spawns a
> shell where all declared inputs are available and all environment
> variables are set, but it does lack a method to run build phases.  It
> would be very nice if we had a tool to selectively run build phases as
> defined in the arguments field.

I hadn't thought othat, and yes it would be nice to run the build phases
as such.

>> Debugging the builder using Guile seems to be somewhat useful but I haven't
>> figured out how to do that as I'm not versed in Guile and this may not be the
>> right level of abstraction.
>
> I have been packaging many applications for Guix and have only felt the
> need for something more advanced than “guix environment” when building
> really large stuff like the icedtea or GCC packages.  These packages
> also have complicated build phases that patch the sources and set
> additional environment variables, and it would have been helpful to have
> a tool to run selected build phases in the current directory.

I've packaged many fewer packages than you have Ricardo, but maybe even
because of that (I'm a lot more inexperienced!) it's sometimes hard for
me to figure out what's going on.

But anyway your above suggestion to start a container or shell and run
certain build phases up to a point would help me a lot.