David Craven <david@craven.ch> writes:

>> I understand that this is some sort of mechanism to enable cargo to build things
>> offline, but is it appropriate to put all of those other packages'
>> source into the "cargo" package that is going to be built by Guix?  I
>> haven't been following the Cargo/Rust in Guix discussion thread, so it's
>> entirely possible I just missed something that was already discussed.
>
> No it is not appropriate. There has been a lot of discussion if it is ok to take
> shortcuts or not, I think the general opinion is that it is not ok.
> But it is a way to
> build cargo without a lot of work, since there are a couple of issues that need
> to be addressed by the cargo-build-system, specifically the importer.

I see.  Since I haven't been involved in the discussion so far, I think
I'll defer to others for further comment on that topic.

>> OK.  That makes sense.  But I wonder why cmake and pkg-config are
>> missing from the list of references if that is the case?
>
> Wow, I don't know what I was thinking, I was convinced that cmake and pkg-config
> where retained inputs :) They should be propagated-inputs
> then... Thanks!

Although making them propagated-inputs might work, another solution
might be to use 'wrap-program' to wrap cargo's executable(s).  For
example, this is what we did when we packaged Asunder:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-12/msg00707.html

Wrapping the program might not be appropriate in every case (see email
thread discussion), but if it's appropriate in this case, it's a great
way to avoid propagated-inputs.

-- 
Chris