Re: pkg-config "Requires" fields and propagated inputs

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer") skribis:
>
>> It might be nice to have build-only propagated inputs.  On the other
>> hand, someone installing libxrandr in their profile will expect
>> pkg-config on libxrandr to work without errors.  More generally, they
>> will expect any build operation to work; i.e. a user might want to use
>> Guix-installed libraries for Guix-external development, and build-only
>> propagated inputs would mean annoying such users because they now have
>> to install them manually.  Unless we provide a special "install for
>> development" operation that is.  But the complexity grows. :-)
>
> Heh.  Another option would be to have per-output propagated inputs.
> That is, if a package has “out” and “lib” outputs, you’d want the
> propagated inputs to apply only to “lib” since this is where the .pc is.
> (This has been in ‘TODO’ for a couple of years.)
>
> Thoughts?

Sounds like an obvious feature to add, and in my (limited) experience
these library deps are the most common propagated inputs...

Taylan