Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> writes: > Chris Marusich <cmmarus...@gmail.com> writes: > >> One last thing: it seems that the NixOS devs' choice of solution was >> influenced by a desire not to require users to rebuild programs that >> were previously installed in their profiles [1]. They almost chose a >> solution like the one you are proposing, but they changed their minds to >> avoid requiring users to rebuild existing programs in their profiles. >> GuixSD is still Beta, so I don't think that's an issue for us at all. >> >> [1] See abbradar's comment on April 8th, 2016: >> >> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/14417#issuecomment-207362530 >> >> "This patch would break all such software that uses old (unpatched) >> GTK+3." >> >> This appears to be the primary reason why they chose to patch GTK+2 and >> GTK+3 to search NIX_PROFILES for an immodules.cache file instead of >> patching it to use separate environment variables for GTK+2 and GTK+3. > > Right, I saw that too, but I really don’t think it applies to us. I’m > not familiar with the state of IBus in NixOS before the change to > NIX_PROFILES, but I don’t see how this would break existing software. > > The reason for crashes is that GTK2 software is made to load GTK3 input > method modules (and vice versa). We don’t set any variables right now > that could have this effect. When adding the “GUIX_GTK{2,3}_*” > variables, software built with the unpatched GTK would just ignore input > methods. > > If I understand correctly, NixOS installs (or used to install) IBus > system-wide and has system-wide caches (at /etc/…/immodules.cache). Our > caches would exist on a per-profile base. > > If you are more familiar with this problem in NixOS and you think I’m > overlooking something I’d be happy if you could show me what I’m > missing, but I really think that we wouldn’t be bitten by a problem like > this. In our case software using the pre-patch GTK versions would > behave just like they do now: simply without IBus support.
One more thing: we could also preempt the decision of GTK upstream and hardcode IBus as the only possible input method system (as has been suggested on the NixOS discussion), but I think that we should rather avoid patching things more than absolutely necessary. (Some people prefer fcitx over IBus; I don’t want to force them to migrate to IBus when there’s a simple alternative.) ~~ Ricardo
