Subject: bug#37940: endless "try upgrading both" cycles

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 10:28:25 +0100

Hi,

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019 01:03:48 +0100
Arne Babenhauserheide <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > Now, it doesn’t sound right that ‘util-linux’ is propagated from glib
> > and from poppler…?  
> 
> Poppler needs glib at runtime and glib needs tools from util-linux at
> runtime?

That doesn't mean glib has to propagate the thing into the profile.

Quite the opposite, Guix is one of the few projects which rightly make the
distinction whether some dependency is an internal implementation detail of
a package or whether it's required in the public interface.

With glib's goal of abstracting stuff from UNIX away I seriously doubt they
intend util-*linux*, of all things, to be part of their public interface.

But you are right that Guix's glib propagates util-linux.  That is most likely
a bug, or it's because of pkg-config files (which also could be solved another
way).

Checking glib-2.50.3, none of their pkg-config files (.pc) mention libmount,
so not sure what's going on.

glib-2.60.6 uses meson which apparently doesn't use pkg-config (?).