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7.4 Bonus: Package Variants

We now have an actual channel, but it contains only one package (see Level 2: The Repository as a Channel). While we’re at it, we can define package variants (see Defining Package Variants in GNU Guix Reference Manual) in our guile-package.scm file, variants that we want to be able to test as Guile developers—similar to what we did above with transformation options. We can add them like so: 

;; This is the ‘.guix/modules/guile-package.scm’ file.

(define-module (guile-package)
  …)

(define-public guile
  …)

(define (package-with-configure-flags p flags)
  "Return P with FLAGS as additional 'configure' flags."
  (package/inherit p
    (arguments
     (substitute-keyword-arguments (package-arguments p)
       ((#:configure-flags original-flags #~(list))
        #~(append #$original-flags #$flags))))))

(define-public guile-without-threads
  (package
    (inherit (package-with-configure-flags guile
                                           #~(list "--without-threads")))
    (name "guile-without-threads")))

(define-public guile-without-networking
  (package
    (inherit (package-with-configure-flags guile
                                           #~(list "--disable-networking")))
    (name "guile-without-networking")))


;; Return the package object defined above at the end of the module.
guile

We can build these variants as regular packages once we’ve pulled the channel. Alternatively, from a checkout of Guile, we can run a command like this one from the top level: 

guix build -L $PWD/.guix/modules guile-without-threads