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	Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:04:12 +0000 (UTC)
From: Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net>
To: Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>, guix-science@gnu.org
Cc: ravanan@systemreboot.net
Subject: Re: Talk at RSECon26 on Guix and ravanan
In-Reply-To: <871paieiht.fsf@gmail.com>
References: <87ik4bcsh8.fsf@systemreboot.net> <871paieiht.fsf@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:04:10 +0100
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List-Id: <ravanan.systemreboot.net>


Hi Simon,

> Well, this year is running faster that my capacity to tackle my TODO
> list=E2=80=A6  As discussed back on Jan. / Feb. I have on my TODO list th=
e item
> about the =E2=80=9Cnode=E2=80=9D part.  Somehow, this
>
>         make NODE=3D/usr/bin/node prefix=3D/usr/local
>         make install
>
> doesn=E2=80=99t seem to me the end of the story. ;-) What I had in mind w=
as to
> see what could be done with the old standard of ECMAScript implemented
> [1] in Guile.  Between a coffee and a beer at Guix Days, Andy answered
> that an easier and maybe better solution might be QuickJS [2] =E2=80=93 a=
 C
> implementation that supports recent standards.

That would be very welcome indeed! I wasn't too pleased myself to depend
on node. The CWL spec only requires ECMAScript 5.1. So, it should be an
easy bar to cross. Patches welcome!

> Another item on my TODO list is to try to run some workflows developed
> by the CWL community with a drop-in replacement of cwltool by ravanan.
> Well, comment on the gap that needs to be filled.

ravanan is already a somewhat compatible drop-in replacement for
cwltool. This is assuming you are invoking them like so:

CWLTOOL_OR_RAVANAN workflow.cwl inputs.yml

where inputs.yml is an YAML file that contains a dictionary mapping
input names to values.

However cwltool also allows directly specifying the inputs on the
command line like so:

cwltool workflow.cwl --foo bar --ham spam

And, it also generates nice --help messages when you run

cwltool workflow.cwl --help

ravanan doesn't support this yet. It should be relatively to support all
this. We just need someone willing to spend a weekend hacking on
args-fold for this. Patches welcome again!

Regards,
Arun