Maybe this is a crazy idea: It appears to me that every language out there today is creating their own build system. We know that creating build-system package support for GNU Guix is complicated by:
1. Live updates over the internet 2. Circular dependencies 3. Tests requiring internet access Now we never got to truely solving npm, for example. And despite heroic efforts: Go, Rust, Racket are often in stages of disarray. The irony is that, when we leverage GNU Guix infrastructure, the software packages themselves can be really simple. All we need is a source ball and a little metadata. From that GNU Guix can do the hard stuff and handle the builds and dependencies. This is why our C build system is so effective and simple packages translate well to GNU Guix. My idea is this: rather than generating 'imports' from native build packages for every target - which is kinda laborious in its way - we could translate an existing Rust/Node/Racket package into an intermediate simple package tar ball - call it a sexp-pack ;). This repackaged sexp-pack can only reference other sexp-packs which gets rid of (1). The sexp-pack generator can identify and help resolve circular dependencies which solves (2). At this intermediate stage we can also also patch sources which helps with (3). We would have a sexp-pack for cargo and another for npm. As sexp-packs are generated from source, the GNU Guix turn around and packaging time can potentially be sped up. And once a hosted sexp-pack exists it is stable. It may be silly to create another layer (of indirection). But I think that breaking up the packaging process this way will help us to actually fix npm and cargo support in a reasonable time frame. Also it works the other way, I would no longer need cargo or Racket packages ;) Pj.
