Subject: [bug#48028] [PATCH wip-gnome v4 3/8] gnu: gtkmm: Add missing native-input and correct propagated-inputs

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2021 17:49:17 -0400

Hi Raghav,

Raghav Gururajan <[email-masked]> writes:

>> It would be good to avoid these version-specific references, if
>> possible.  Can you help me understand the rationale?  Did you find that
>> there is an incompatibility between the latest stable versions of
>> 'gtkmm', 'atkmm', 'cairomm', and 'pangomm'?  If so, could you help me
>> understand the nature of that incompatibility?  Perhaps it can be
>> addressed in another way.
>
> Its because of ABI incompatibility. The pkg-config for gtkmm, checks for 
> specific ABI versions of atkmm, cairomm and pangomm.
>
>> If it turns out that these versioned references are truly unavoidable,
>> it would be good to add comments next to those references, briefly
>> explaining the rationale.
>
> I have added comment in the code, in v5.

Respectfully, it seems to me that you've been too quick to dismiss my
concerns.  As I pointed out in my previous email:

  (1) [These versioned references] will likely lead to conflicts within
  profiles.  For example, a profile that includes both 'gtkmm' and
  'cairomm' may fail to build, because it would require including both
  'cairomm' and 'cairomm-1.13',

This could be a real annoyance.  Guix users should be able to run "guix
install gtkmm atkmm cairomm pangomm" and have that work.  With these
proposed patches applied, I suspect that it might not work.

Traditional GNU/Linux distributions that package GNOME 40 will certainly
choose versions of 'gtkmm', 'atkmm', 'cairomm', and 'pangomm' that are
compatible with each other.  We should too, I think.

>From my own experience performing a GNOME upgrade for Guix a few years
ago, I remember that when the GNOME developers produce a new GNOME
release, they provide somewhere a list of the versions of each component
that are part of that release.  Presumably they choose those versions to
be compatible with each other.

This makes me wonder if some of the GNOME components on the 'wip-gnome'
branch are newer than they should be (perhaps a development version) or
older than they should be.

What do you think?

    Regards,
      Mark

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