Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes:
As you may know, librsvg 2.50 on ‘core-updates-frozen’ depends
on Rust.
However mrustc, which we use to build the first Rust compiler,
currently
only works on x86_64. This means that ~28% of the packages on
‘core-updates-frozen’ are x86_64-only (vs. ~15% on ‘master’).
Among these, the most problematic missing packages are desktop
environments: Xfce, GNOME, etc. So far our “pledge”, encoded in
‘etc/release-manifest.scm’, was that all the desktop
environments would
be available on x86_64 and i686, so that one could install Guix
System
just the same way on both. Currently this is no longer possible
on
‘core-updates-frozen’, and I think that’s a problem.
The patch below does something unorthodox: it reintroduces
librsvg 2.40
(written in C) and uses it selectively so we can have a desktop
environment with Xfce on i686. It’s not enough to get GDM
though;
there’s a couple of GNOME packages that depend on librsvg and I
haven’t
checked whether they work with the old librsvg.
There is also the unpleasant option to introduce a rust binary for
architectures other than x86_64, because we can’t bootstrap it
there. It should be noted that this would not be unprecedented.
We have bootstrap binaries for some compilers such as Free Pascal
or GHC.
Adding an old version of librsvg is not obviously the better
option.
--
Ricardo
