Subject: Re: bug#43501: gst-plugins-bad cannot be built on linux-armhf, breaking qemu

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2020 23:40:13 -0400

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> This occurs on master (commit 679d5e6b3dcac4ee1f419c04b3719fead0bd9ee5).
>
> qemu-minimal is not impacted, but the fully-fledged qemu package
> cannot be built, due to a dependency on gst-plugins-bad, which fails to
> build like:

It would be good to eliminate that dependency.  Ever since 'spice-gtk'
was added, it has included *every* gstreamer plugin package in its
'propagated-inputs'.  I'm not sure, but it may have been motivated by a
goal that some Guix developers have advocated, to make packages in Guix
work "out of the box" in a way that users of proprietary systems have
come to expect, i.e. with popular patented codecs included.

I think it's important that Guix core functionality should be usable
without installing a collection of patented media codecs.  Those plugins
should be purely optional.  In my opinion, we should find a way to
eliminate those dependencies.

       Mark