Re: Optional runtime dependencies in Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Gammel Holte <address@hidden> skribis:

> Nix doesn't have a good decoupling between packages and their optional
> runtime dependencies. You can disable them, but this would lead to a
> different package hash, and thus a different build (negating the use of
> prebuilt binaries).
>
> Therefore, the culture seems to have all default package builds with all
> optional runtime dependencies on. This leads to situations such as
> installing mutt, and getting python as a dependency (via mutt -> gpgme ->
> glib -> python), which is quite ugly.

That’s indeed undesirable.

As I just wrote to Taylan Ulrich, this is currently handled on a
case-by-case basis using multiple outputs (which I think Nixpkgs doesn’t
use a lot yet.)

For instance, GLib has a separate “bin” output for this very reason (see
<http://bugs.gnu.org/17853>.)  Git, as I wrote, has separate outputs for
git-svn and Tcl stuff.  Same for WordNet.  There are also separate
outputs for debugging symbols.

So I wouldn’t claim this is a solved problem, because it really gets
fixed when we discover a problematic case, and we certainly overlook
some of them.  Yet, that’s something I pay attention to, and I think we
must clearly look to address more of such issues.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.