defining core modules

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Guix,

for the past few days I’ve been trying to reduce the module closure of
“coreutils” by inspecting the output of

    guix graph -t module coreutils

This has shown a number of modules that are much too large and pull in
almost all other modules.

I’d like to propose a reduction of the modules to a core set.  To ensure
that they stay small we would move them to the directory
gnu/packages/core/.  Adding new module references to any of the modules
in that directory would only be permitted for very good reasons.

What do you think about separating these modules?

One place to start with is (gnu packages linux), which is huge.  (gnu
packages base) only needs libcap and linux-libre-headers, however.
These could be moved to gnu/packages/core/linux.scm.

Or we could give all the packages in the core set their own module.

(Let’s please not discuss moving all packages to their own modules.
This has been discussed elsewhere.)

-- 
Ricardo