Hi Rodrigo! In a topic adjacent to your second question, I wanted to share something that I recently learned about using local-file in package definitions. I ran through a similar exercise when building a package that largely consisted of local file, and came upon a similar solution of adding local-file forms to the source field. However, I ran into an issue when including multiple local files, because the name that the build code looks up is just an underscore by default (I do not remember for sure how it handles multiple local files, I think it was just adding an extra underscore for each new file). This is fine with just one file as in your example, but is not particularly readable when you're working with multiple files. The names can be set explicitly, but this syntax is deprecated (see https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2021/the-big-change/ for a detailed discussion of this, if you aren't already familiar). And unfortunately, you can't mix the two syntaxes; that is, if you are writing a more complex package with both local files and normal package inputs, you would have to write the normal package inputs using the deprecated syntax as well, or accept the underscore names.
However, after digging through some upstream package definitions, I learned that there is an idiom to solve this: there is actually no need to include the local files in the source field, you can include them directly in the build definition using g-expressions! Written with this idiom, a simple package that just copies a file would look like this: ,--- | (use-modules | (guix build-system trivial) | (guix gexp) | (guix packages) | ) | | (package | (name "copy-file-using-gexp") | (version "0.1") | (home-page #f) | (synopsis #f) | (description #f) | (license #f) | (source #f) | | (build-system trivial-build-system) | ; NOTE: arguments is now a plain list instead of a quoted list | (arguments (list | #:modules '((guix build utils)) | ; NOTE: builder is now defined inside of a gexp, indicated by the #~ | #:builder #~(begin | (use-modules (guix build utils)) | | (let* ((dir (string-append %output "/share")) | (file (string-append dir "/foo.txt"))) | (mkdir-p dir) | ; NOTE: the local file is now included inline as an ungexp'd | ; form, indicated by the #$ | (copy-file #$(local-file "/tmp/foo.txt") file)))))) `--- I hope this was helpful and/or interesting! - Skyler