How to deal with system-wide state databases

[Roel Janssen <roel@gnu.org>]

Dear Guix,

I've been trying to get the help feature in gparted to work, but it uses
an external program for it called "scrollkeeper".  No problem so far,
because I have a working package for it.

However, Scrollkeeper maintains a database in which all documentation
that is compatible with scrollkeeper is linked, creating a central point
to search for help files.

It all comes down to this invocation:
scrollkeeper-update -p /gnu/store/c9bp09...-scrollkeeper-0.3.14/var/lib/scrollkeeper \
                    -o /gnu/store/xgbvyq...-gparted-0.26.0/share/omf/gparted

The -p option specifies the scrollkeeper database directory.

How should we deal with mechanisms like this?  Should I change the scrollkeeper
database directory per program, so in this case it becomes:
/gnu/store/xgbvyqs...-gparted-0.26.0/var/lib/scrollkeeper

Or can we deal with this in a more cross-package way?

Kind regards,
Roel Janssen