Re: [PATCH 3/3] gnu: Add octave and dependencies

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:

> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:11:14AM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>
>      > Ok.  Andraes' and Ludo's explanations convince me.  However I'm skeptical that
>      > the Octave devs would be quite so convinced.  And removing the propagates-inputs
>      > will mean patching to the Octave source and I don't know how difficult this will be.
>      
>      The patch that would be great upstream is:
>      
>        AC_PATH_PROG([MAKEINFO], [makeinfo])
>        AC_SUBST([MAKEINFO])
>      
>      and then use ???@MAKEINFO@??? wherever ???makeinfo??? is expected in the source
>      (similarly for ???less???, etc.)
>
>      Ludo???.
>
> Having thought about this some more, looked to see what is currently in the 
> octave source and "discussed" the issue on #octave I think now the best solution
> is to simply remove all the propagated-inputs from the package (and leave inputs
> and native-inputs as they are).  Rationale:
>
> * Octave "works" without all these programs (albeit in a rather featureless 
>   fashion).  If a user wants to add the feature, then she just needs to 
>   guix package -i <foo>.
> * It seems to have been a deliberate decision by the octave developers to rely 
>   on $PATH to select the appropriate version of these external programs.
> * Changing this behaviour would involve alterations to the octave source touching 
>   many files, and I think upstream would be unlikely to cooperate with us.

Item #2 is definitely a good reason to leave things untouched (no
propagation, no patching.)

> The disadvantage of this approach is, that a guix user who installs octave, but 
> not the other packages, gets only a barely functional version.  Perhaps we need 
> a (recommended-inputs `(...)) like in debian.

Yes, that would make sense.

Could you file this to bug-guix@gnu.org (with the ‘wishlist’ tag, if you
master Debbugs)?

TIA,
Ludo’.