Re: Desktops on non-x86_64 systems

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> As you may know, librsvg 2.50 on ‘core-updates-frozen’ depends 
> on Rust.
> However mrustc, which we use to build the first Rust compiler, 
> currently
> only works on x86_64.  This means that ~28% of the packages on
> ‘core-updates-frozen’ are x86_64-only (vs. ~15% on ‘master’).
>
> Among these, the most problematic missing packages are desktop
> environments: Xfce, GNOME, etc.  So far our “pledge”, encoded in
> ‘etc/release-manifest.scm’, was that all the desktop 
> environments would
> be available on x86_64 and i686, so that one could install Guix 
> System
> just the same way on both.  Currently this is no longer possible 
> on
> ‘core-updates-frozen’, and I think that’s a problem.
>
> The patch below does something unorthodox: it reintroduces 
> librsvg 2.40
> (written in C) and uses it selectively so we can have a desktop
> environment with Xfce on i686.  It’s not enough to get GDM 
> though;
> there’s a couple of GNOME packages that depend on librsvg and I 
> haven’t
> checked whether they work with the old librsvg.

There is also the unpleasant option to introduce a rust binary for 
architectures other than x86_64, because we can’t bootstrap it 
there.  It should be noted that this would not be unprecedented. 
We have bootstrap binaries for some compilers such as Free Pascal 
or GHC.

Adding an old version of librsvg is not obviously the better 
option.

-- 
Ricardo