Subject: bug#47479: inkscape retains a reference to imagemagick, even though it is in native-inputs

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2024 23:07:18 -0500

Hello,

[...]

>>> On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 04:55:13AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
>>>> I see now that I'm using an older version, although I would have
>>>> preferred the newer one.  I refer to the variable name 'inkscape' from
>>>> my manifest file, and I expected that to point to the latest stable
>>>> version.  However, it seems that one must use the 'inkscape-1.0'
>>>> variable to get the latest stable version.  That's seems suboptimal.
>>>> 
>>>> I wonder if the 'inkscape' variable should be renamed 'inkscape/stable'
>>>> (for use in packages such as 'dblatex/stable'), and then 'inkscape'
>>>> could be repurposed to point to the latest stable version.  Thoughts?
>>>
>>> I think we should do this, or even remove the old Inkscape package now.
>>>
>>> I'm guessing the reason for keeping the older release series is that
>>> the Inkscape save-file format changed?
>>
>> The reason [email-masked] is still kept around is becauseInkscape@1
>> doesn't build on ARM (more accurately, one of its dependencies,
>> lib2geom, doesn't).  It's been a while since I looked at the issue, and
>> it seems there may have been some activity in lib2geom upstream to try
>> to address the problem, so we should revisit it.
>
> That's not relevant anymore, but our current inkscape 1.2 depends on
> imagemagick still.  Seeing how it now links directly to it, I've added
> it to inputs as well in commit 552ebc47af and pushed to core-updates.

I've applied some patches from Maxime and refined my understanding of
what this was about; it was not just about retaining a reference to
imagemagick listed from native-inputs, it was about retaining a
reference to imagemagick for the *stable* variant of inkscape/stable,
which meant we couldn't use the imagemagick/stable insecure variant.

Tentatively fixed in b4a6b1ba93844d7373c58237cb0b742352dec954 ("gnu:
inkscape/stable: Build stable variant without imagemagick support.")
which builds on a series from Maxime Devos.  I haven't caught up with
rebuilding core-updates yet to validate it truly works, but we'll see
soon.

Thanks, Maxime!

-- 
Maxim