Subject: bug#28298: Downgrades in xfontsel and other packages using app-defaults

From: Alex Kost <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 22:14:35 +0300

John Darrington (2017-08-30 15:21 -0400) wrote:

> It looks fine to me.  I don't get that warning.

But did you actually tried what I wrote?:

  $ `guix build xfontsel`/bin/xfontsel

> The XAPPLRESDIR is no longer required because the libxt library has
> been patched.

Oh, I didn't know about this "libxt-guix-search-paths.patch".  I think
now I understand: with this patch, xfontsel and other programs should
work only when they are installed from the usual guix profiles (system
and user ones), right?

In my opinion, this is the wrong approach.  A user may install these
programs in non-standard profiles.  For example, I don't use
"~/.guix-profile" at all; instead I use several other profiles, so there
is no chance for me to have 'xfontsel' work properly.

Also, I think a program should preferably work when it is started
directly from store.

So I strongly believe that using wrappers was the right approach, and we
should return to it.

-- 
Alex