John Darrington <j...@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis: > On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:11:14AM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote: > > > Ok. Andraes' and Ludo's explanations convince me. However I'm > skeptical that > > the Octave devs would be quite so convinced. And removing the > propagates-inputs > > will mean patching to the Octave source and I don't know how difficult > this will be. > > The patch that would be great upstream is: > > AC_PATH_PROG([MAKEINFO], [makeinfo]) > AC_SUBST([MAKEINFO]) > > and then use ???@MAKEINFO@??? wherever ???makeinfo??? is expected in the > source > (similarly for ???less???, etc.) > > Ludo???. > > Having thought about this some more, looked to see what is currently in the > octave source and "discussed" the issue on #octave I think now the best > solution > is to simply remove all the propagated-inputs from the package (and leave > inputs > and native-inputs as they are). Rationale: > > * Octave "works" without all these programs (albeit in a rather featureless > fashion). If a user wants to add the feature, then she just needs to > guix package -i <foo>. > * It seems to have been a deliberate decision by the octave developers to > rely > on $PATH to select the appropriate version of these external programs. > * Changing this behaviour would involve alterations to the octave source > touching > many files, and I think upstream would be unlikely to cooperate with us.
Item #2 is definitely a good reason to leave things untouched (no propagation, no patching.) > The disadvantage of this approach is, that a guix user who installs octave, > but > not the other packages, gets only a barely functional version. Perhaps we > need > a (recommended-inputs `(...)) like in debian. Yes, that would make sense. Could you file this to bug-g...@gnu.org (with the ‘wishlist’ tag, if you master Debbugs)? TIA, Ludo’.
