Re: Optional runtime dependencies in Guix

[Gammel Holte <gammel.holte@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 05:26:02PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > To begin with, we could have a “weechat” package with a “reasonable”
> > option set:
> >   (define weechat
> >     (make-weechat "weechat"))
> >
> > And possibly another variant with, say, all the options enabled:
> >   (define weechat-full
> >     (make-weechat "weechat-full" #:python? #t #:lua? #t))
>
> So far, our policy has rather been to enable all possible inputs. I think
> this should be the default with the name "weechat" unaltered. If need be,
> one could add another package with fewer inputs under the name
> "weechat-small" or similar.
>
> What do others think? If there is consensus, we could formalise something
> in the package naming section of the manual.
>
> Apart from that, I do not see why having several scripting languages
> enabled
> is a problem; in the end, it is quite likely that they are present anyway
> due
> to one package or another (it is rather difficult to avoid perl and python
> these days!). So my real preference would be to not have such "...-small"
> packages except for outrageously big default packages (texlive comes to
> mind here...).
>

I disagree here. I have very functional Arch & Gentoo installs with no
scripting language other than Perl, which is a dependency of many GNU tools.

In particular I'm doing just fine without Python. Installing everything by
default is a bit suboptimal from a security point of view, especially if
you're adding loads of interpreters.

Also, if you're working on a constrained system, the fewer packages the
better.

I liked the solution of giving recommends or suggests for interpreters.


> > A long term possibility would be to officially support something like
> > Gentoo’s “USE” flags.  These would be declared as part of the package,
> > and the build process would take them into account somehow:
>
> To me, this sounds like overkill to solve a problem that I am not
> convinced exists.
>
> Andreas
>
>
>

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