Re: How to handle required plugins and dbus services for GNOME Programs?

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org> skribis:
>
>> Adding 'dconf' and 'libcanberra' as default inputs to
>> 'glib-or-gtk-build-system' would make many of these problems go away,
>> with the only drawback of a possibly unused entry in an environment
>> variable.
>
> Another drawback is that it will increase the size of the closure of
> each package that is concerned (‘emacs’ is at 835 MiB without dconf nor
> libcanberra.)

That's a scary number, but, I guess, it does include libraries shared
with a large number of programs. So it doesn't represent (in the
typical case) what you need to download "just" to add emacs.

>
>> However, if you want to be super accurate then yes, this
>> will not do.
>
> I guess it’s a trade-off.
>
> How difficult would it be to identify applications that require the
> dconf GIO module (Totem, Evince) vs. those that can live without it
> (Emacs)?

I was just trying to provide some input (like having to set
GIO_EXTRA_MODULES up in this thread) from things that I did
investigate a while back... I'm not trying to disturb the piece of
mind of anybody. Right now I have no time to do this kind of
investigations.

The way I came across GIO_EXTRA_MODULES, was by looking at how I could
suppress the warnings we are talking about, in the emacs package. I've
found that, despite possibly not being needed, many people are annoyed
by such warnings and are interested in suppressing them (I was one of
those). In the end of the day, as an end user without knowledge of the
program internals, how can you know if it is harmless or a real
problem?

>
> Likewise, what fraction of the ‘glib-or-gtk-build-system’ packages
> require dconf?
>
> Based on that, we could choose to either make it opt-in (that is,
> explicitly add dconf as an input when needed), or opt-out (dconf is an
> implicit input of ‘glib-or-gtk-build-system’ that can be removed with
> #:dconf? #f).  Similarly with libcanberra.
>
> How does that sound?

I have a very small number of guix based graphical programs. So, my
case is not very relevant statistically. But, all of them either
complain about at least one of the two packages in question, or they
do have them as inputs.

0 means: it's not an input and I can't see complains.
1 means: it's either an input, or I get complains.

| package           | dconf | libcanberra |
|-------------------+-------+-------------|
| emacs             |     1 |           1 |
| evince            |     1 |           1 |
| python-matplotlib |     0 |           1 |
| inkscape          |     0 |           1 |
| gimp              |     0 |           1 |

Regards,
Fede