taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer") writes:

> These packages need to be used in a somewhat peculiar way:
>
> - install *both* mupen64plus-core and mupen64plus-ui-console in your
>   profile,
>
> - install all the plugins in your profile,
>
> - in your config file ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mupen64plus/mupen64plus.cfg),
>   set Core/SharedDataPath to $guix_profile/share/mupen64plus, and set
>   UI-Console/PluginDir to $guix_profile/lib/mupen64plus,
>
> - specify your input/audio/video/rsp plugins of choice (for video, the
>   Glide64 ones work well for me, and the HLE one for RSP).
>
> That yields a working setup.  I don't know if I can make it work any
> better out of the box (without horrible hacks and/or substantial patches
> to the C code) because the whole system seems to assume the existence of
> a single "shared data" and a single "plugin" directory, so a user is
> best served by installing all preferred mupen64plus-* packages into one
> profile and then pointing the data and plugin directories there as
> described above.  In particular, the -core package needs to be installed
> too (despite ui-console already closing over it) because it also
> provides a data file without which some things don't work.

I now tackled this problem the following way:

- mupen64plus-ui-console is the recommended way to install mupen and
  propagates a basic set of plugins and the core library package (from
  which a data file is needed; the .so is referenced absolutely so
  that's not the reason),

- the C code of the console UI gets a Guix-specific patch which prints a
  flashy notice for Guix users when no plugins are found, instructing
  the user to edit their config so and so.

In the future I might provide some proper patches to the C code to take
the directory paths from environment variables in addition to the
existing mechanisms (CLI flag, .ini file, hardcoded system paths), but
for now I think this is good enough.

Comments welcome.