Sharlatan Hellseher <sharlatanus@gmail.com> writes:
Bazel is in guix-science, with a bazel-build-system as well. It's
compatible when looking at just the licenses, but there are a number of
annoying wrinkles:
- Bazel itself bundles lots of binaries (Java libraries); I have made no
serious attempt at unbundling them. Packaging Java libraries gives me
ulcers.
- the bazel-build-system works in ways that are really quite mismatched
with how Guix works. It performs a two-stage build: the first step is
to run Bazel to download "sources" in a fixed output derivation; the
second step (at a later time) is to unpack these hash-identified
sources and run Bazel again without the download.
- Bazel makes it *very* hard or even impossible to replace parts of the
build dependencies with packages from Guix. I recently added
python-ray to guix-science, which insists on using its own GNU Make
(among many others). This means that the source blob is usually
incredibly large.
- Bazel does not care about whether something is source or binary. The
bazel-build-system assumes that the first step is to download sources
only. Bazel does not see it this way and is perfectly happy to fetch
or build binaries at this stage. It has happened a number of times
that the hash of the fixed output derivation changed after an update
of seemingly unrelated libraries, because the fixed output wasn't
fixed after all.
I'd rather move Keras to guix-science than to contaminate Guix proper
with the abomination that is the bazel-build-system (and its relative
Bazel, which I will attempt not to call an abomination in public).
--
Ricardo
