Re: Elixir upstream question

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> writes:

> I raised issue https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/5043
>
> Jose Valim, the author of Elixir, responded with:
>
> ---
>
> I would love to include patches that generally make Mix or Elixir work
> better but those seem like they would be putting a maintenance burden
> on us, specially because we don't really know what is available on GNU
> Guix and what is not. We would be guessing, specially when some of
> those outcomes is exactly what we are testing (like handling of the
> HOME environment variable).
>
> Can't we rather try figure out if we can set a reliable PATH for
> running those tests suites so we can use dialyzer and git as usual?
>
> ---
>
> git and some other tools can be invoked from one place and patched. I
> can help fix that.
>
> My question: in the build environment, what would be a good stub for
> $HOME? Can we use something for $TMPDIR?

It is okay to set the HOME environment variable.  A couple of packages
that need to write to $HOME for tests do this in a build phase.

Here’s a snippet from the “asymptote” package:

         (add-before 'check 'set-HOME
           ;; Some tests require write access to $HOME, otherwise leading to
           ;; "failed to create directory /homeless-shelter/.asy" error.
           (lambda _
             (setenv "HOME" "/tmp")
             #t))

Does this help or am I misunderstanding?

~~ Ricardo