Re: emacs packaging: do we need to pull existing dependencies ?

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Am Mittwoch, dem 01.02.2023 um 08:44 +0100 schrieb Cayetano Santos:
> [D]o we need to pull most up-to-date dependencies, even if already  
> present in current emacs, when upstream package requires them to 
> keep backward compatibility ? Do we assume that guix emacs (28.2) 
> already includes them, and remove the dependency from the inputs ? Is
> it a good strategy to deal with two different versions of a 
> dependency?
The proper Guix way would actually be to unvendor those packages from
Emacs and offer them separately.  We could certainly do this for quite
a number (e.g. org, cc-mode, ...), but it would be work that someone
has to do and that person better not be lazy like me and take several
months to add native-compilation ;)

> Say for example emacs-org-roam@2.2.2: it requires emacs-org 9.4, 
> which is not specified in the package definition, meaning we always 
> pull the latest available. Do we have to, provided that emacs
> releases with org? Maybe there is already a clear rule about this
> topic, but to me this is not clear. We have package definitions with
> both criteria.
I think it's important to think about this in terms of forward
compatibility.  Is org-roam guaranteed to always work with "the current
version of Emacs, whatever that may happen to be"?  In that case, you
could currently drop emacs-org.  If it requires bleeding edge symbols
on the other hand, or may freely decide that it will need them, adding
emacs-org to the inputs is a good idea.


Cheers