Hello everyone, Following a report on IRC [1] that nss-certs wouldn't cross-build, I found out that the old syntax of using %output instead of the shinier $output was still supported only when native-compiling, and not when cross-compiling, at least for build-systems inheriting from gnu.
Looking at guix/build-system/gnu.scm [2], we have gnu-build vs. gnu-cross-build, which are responsible for native vs. cross-builds. The former uses with-build-variables to set the legacy build variables such as %output and %outputs (see the def in guix/gexp.scm), whereas the latter does not, only doing so manually and so omitting %output. This means that packages that were not updated to fit the new style should all fail to cross-compile. This simple bug could be resolved by adding %output to gnu-cross-build, however as was argued on IRC this is now undocumented behaviour and we'd rather switch all packages to the new style instead. While I 100% agree with this, I think we should have a uniform deprecation policy for this matter, and that there shouldn't be such a disparity between cross and native builds. What do you all think? [1] https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2022-03-30.log#150521 [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/build-system/gnu.scm?id=1c2da6603565bafba58b81742ce705dc8becb2f7 Best, -- Josselin Poiret