On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 03:16:45AM +0100, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
> Hold on. I thought this happened *all the actual time*.
> 
> To me, the output of ‘guix graph’ implies that ghc[*] refers directly to
> perl, and ghc-haddock-library to hspec-discover, and that both of those
> are native inputs.
> 
> These are just the first two examples of packages with native inputs
> that I happened to pull out of my haskell.scm. While Haskell does seem
> particularly naughty, I've no reason to believe it's unique.
> 
> Are these not ‘run-time references’? Is your use of the term narrower
> than mine?

I think of "run-time references" as explicit store references
(file-names) found in the build output by the post-build reference
scanner and recorded in /var/guix/db. These references are what grafting
rewrites.

`guix gc --references` can be used to query the database for a given
store item.

`guix graph`, on the other hand, shows the graphs of package
definitions. That is, the list of inputs, native-inputs,
propagated-inputs, etc. Some of these inputs could be totally
superfluous, and the build output would ideally not contain any
explicit references to them at all.

The term "reference" has a few meanings in Guix, but I think that Mark
is talking about explicit store paths.