Subject: [bug#34470] [PATCH 4/8] gnu: gdm: Use absolute path for gnome-session.

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2019 10:13:12 -0500

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi!
>
> Timothy Sample <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> * gnu/packages/gnome.scm (gdm)[arguments]: Modify the pre-configure
>> phase to substitute in the absolute path of gnome-session.
>> [inputs]: Add gnome-session.
>
> This patch means that we’re pulling in GNOME even when we don’t actually
> need it:
>
> $ guix size gdm |tail -1
> total: 909.4 MiB
> $ guix size gdm gnome-session |tail -1
> total: 1011.8 MiB
>
> Do you think we could avoid that?

My understanding is that the login screen is more or less a normal user
session brought up by gnome-session for the “gdm” user.  Shy of
re-implementing the parts of gnome-session we need, I don’t have any
ideas on how to avoid this dependency.  I know that GDM sends it a list
of components to initialize (e.g., GNOME Shell), but I don’t know what
else it does for GDM.

My guess is that it would be possible to trim down some of these
packages to recover the space.  GDM is very heavy-weight software, but
1G seems like a lot.

:(

-- Tim