On Mon, Sep 06 2021, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:

> Am Montag, den 06.09.2021, 13:51 -0400 schrieb Maxim Cournoyer:
>> Hello Arun,
>> 
>> Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, Aug 11 2021, Arun Isaac wrote:
>> > 
>> > > Hi all,
>> > > 
>> > > I actually think we should not add emacs-vertico to the
>> > > propagated-inputs, and remove emacs-flycheck and emacs-selectrum
>> > > as well. All these are optional dependencies, and we should leave
>> > > it to the user to install the ones they want. At least in this
>> > > specific case, the three packages (flycheck, selectrum and
>> > > vertico) are the kind the user would want to explicitly install.
>> > > They aren't backend libraries that ought to remain invisible to
>> > > the user.
>> > > 
>> > > In fact, this is the version of emacs-consult I have installed in
>> > > my profile.
>> 
>> Guix packages typically come as featureful as possible unless there
>> are good reasons not too (to minimize the closure size, for
>> example).  In this case, the added optional dependencies seem to have
>> negligible effect on the closure size, according to `guix size`; I'd
>> be in favor to keep the optional dependencies specified for that
>> reason, unless there are other considerations that I'm missing.
> While closure size is normally a good metric, with interpreted
> languages like Emacs Lisp you have the added baggage of *propagating*
> inputs, thereby installing stuff at user (or system) level, that the
> user did not actually ask for.  My personal take on those is to provide
> them as inputs where necessary to compile, but not actually propagate
> them where not necessary to run.
>
> For example, an Emacs package might require emacs-dash to function at
> all and might install some autocompletion stuff with emacs-autocomplete 
> or emacs-company (perhaps even both).  emacs-dash absolutely must be
> propagated, but unless you're already using autocomplete or company and
> thus have them in your manifest, you probably don't want them to be
> installed by emacs-foo.  Does this make sense?

I just noticed that the “16.4.6 Emacs Packages” section of the manual
has the following paragraph.

     The Elisp dependencies of Emacs packages are typically provided as
  ‘propagated-inputs’ when required at run time.  As for other packages,
  build or test dependencies should be specified as ‘native-inputs’.
  
Since these optional dependencies (‘emacs-autocomplete’ and
‘emacs-company’ in your case) are not needed at runtime, would it make
sense to make them ‘native-inputs’ instead of ‘inputs’?