bug#31540: [PATCH] gnu: xapers: Fix recommended packages

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Adam,

Adam Massmann <massmannak@gmail.com> skribis:

> Below is a patch to fix/update inputs for xapers. When I originally
> added xapers I avoided including inputs upstream considers
> "recommended."  After using Guix and xapers some more and thinking about
> it, I now lean towards including these inputs because in this case not
> including them will break xapers functionality in undocumented ways, and
> the recommended packages are relatively modest. However, I am also
> curious for future use if there is any documentation on standards for
> handling "recommended" packages (e.g. packages other disdros would
> assign a "recommended tag" to) in Guix? I couldn't find anything in the
> manual, but it is very possible I missed something.

There’s currently no mechanism to recommend a package.  However in this
case the recommend packages need to be present at build time, not just
at configure time IIUC, so a recommendation system wouldn’t help, would
it?

For optional build-time dependencies, a criterion we commonly use is the
benefit vs. space ratio.  So basically you run ‘guix size’ with and
without the optional dependency, and based on that you determine whether
it’s a good idea to add it.

Here I get 323 MiB with your patch and 324 MiB (!) without it for the
whole xapers closure.  I think that’s because the new one no longer
refers to xterm or something?

> I also disabled the "xapers-adder" command from spawning an x-terminal
> program (upstream uses Debian's "x-terminal-emulator"). By disabling
> this function we avoid pushing an x-terminal program onto users, which I
> find undesirable (if users need to spawn a terminal they can just wrap
> xapers-adder e.g. "xterm -e xapers-adder %F"). However, I'm open to
> other solutions if anyone else has another preference/idea (see comment
> in patch).

Makes sense to me.

>>From 434455c9be92ecb34e220726dfc75b916e0eaa6c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Adam Massmann <massmannak@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 20 May 2018 18:50:03 -0400
> Subject: [PATCH] gnu: xapers: Fix recommended packages
>
> * gnu/packages/search.scm (xapers): [inputs]: remove python, poppler
> [propagated-inputs]: add poppler, xclip, xdg-utils.
> [arguments]: modify-phases to disable x-terminal options.

Applied, thanks!

Ludo’.