Subject: Re: bug#31366: Missing icons in virt-manager user-interface

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2018 15:11:49 +0200

Mike Gerwitz <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'm sorry if this type of thing has been discussed before (I don't read
> every message on the Guix lists), but what about some way of indicating
> recommended packages as part of the package definition (a sort of soft
> dependency).  Guix could then output to the user after installation that
> certain package(s) ought to be installed for things to work optimally.
>
> Guix could then be helpful to the user without expecting the user to
> have read all relevant sections of the manual (I have only read portions
> so far).  `guix package` maybe could also have a flag to automatically
> install recommended packages into the user's profile.

One way of achieving this is to record recommended packages in the
package’s properties list.  (We use the properties list very rarely
because it easily becomes a grab bag of miscellaneous things that don’t
fit anywhere else.)

Much like we pin search path recommendations to certain “root” packages
we could do something similar for recommended packages.  “glibc”, for
example, could recommend “glibc-locales”; having a package installed
that links with glibc (i.e. all of them) would result in a
recommendation to also install the “glibc-locales” package.  For “gtk+”
the recommendation could be to also install one of the icon themes.
Installing any package depending on “gtk+” would then lead to a
recommendation to install one of these packages.

Unfortunately, some of these recommendations will only be correct when
using Guix on top of a foreign distribution, because we handle common
scenarios on the Guix-based GNU system directly.

--
Ricardo