Hey Brett!

On Fri, Jan 18 2019, brettg@posteo.net wrote:
> The issue with this meta package is that I am inheriting the 
> hello base package because I am not sure how to bypass needing a 
> source to pull from. There is likely a better way to do this 
> meta-package sort of deal. Does anybody have any ideas?

I think gnome is a similar sort of meta-package. It has the 
following structure:

(define-public gnome
  (package
    (name "gnome")
    (version (package-version gnome-shell))
    (source #f)
    (build-system trivial-build-system)
    (arguments '(#:builder (begin (mkdir %output) #t)))
    (propagated-inputs
     ... lots of inputs here ...)
    (synopsis "The GNU desktop environment")
    (home-page "https://www.gnome.org/")
    (description
     "GNOME is the graphical desktop for GNU.  It includes a wide 
     variety of
applications for browsing the web, editing text and images, 
creating
documents and diagrams, playing media, scanning, and much more.")
    (license license:gpl2+)))

I assume that will work for you, too.

Carlo