Re: Best-practice to "develop" a system-config / service?

[Marius Bakke]

Hartmut Goebel <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> TL;DR: How do I get my in-development version of guix into the VM build
> with this version?
>
> I made KDE Plasma start up in a VM by adding tons of packages to the
> system declaration (to be on the save side). Now for finishing and
> providing a nice service declaration I need to strip this list of
> packages down to the bare minimum.
>
> Since a vm (sharing the host store) is unacceptable sloooooow, I've
> build a vm-image using my development environment ("./pre-inst-env guix
> system vm-image …"). Now within the VM-image there is a different
> version of guix installed than the in-development one I used for
> building the VM. Of course the former one does not know any of the
> packages I've just added. So I can't not just run "guix system
> reconfigure …".
>
> After some luckless tries I assume the easiest solution would be to get
> my in-development version of guix into the VM. How to achieve this?
>
>
> What I've tried:
>
> 0) Using a VM sharing the host store: Here starting Plasma takes 2
> minutes, which is not acceptable for series of tests.
>
> 1) My first idea was to share my development directory with the VM and
> run "./pre-inst-env guix system reconfigure …" from within the VM. This
> failed with
>
>   ./pre-inst-env: …/scripts/guix: /gnu/store/…-profile/bin/guile: bad
> interpreter: No such file or directory

Running `./configure` again inside the VM should make it pick up
available versions of Guile and other dependencies.  Will that work?

Another approach you might find useful is writing a "system test" that
starts a Plasma desktop.  Look in (gnu tests) for inspiration.  This has
the added benefit that we will notice early if KDE breaks.

Hope this helps!

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