Subject: [bug#51845] [PATCH 0/2] Add librsvg-bootstrap

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2021 18:27:02 +0100

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 14.11.2021, 16:07 +0200 schrieb Efraim Flashner:
> librsvg is an input for emacs, gtk+@2 and gtk+@3. With the rust
> inputs this leads to (unknown) rust libraries causing the rebuild of
> over 3000 packages on core-updates-frozen. Rather than hunt them down
> I tracked down the packages which would have many rebuilds and added
> a copy of librsvg for them to use.
In my opinion, one of the selling points of Guix is that of
bootstrappability.  I don't think adding big blobs to Emacs of all
things is a great way of delivering on that promise.  I think we ought
to rather "invest" in alternatives to Rust and Rust-locked libraries or
make Rust packaging itself sane (if it can at all).

I think librsvg is optional already and people who want to save on
compilation time can decide to replace it with e.g. GNU hello using the
--input option.  In the similar case of mozjs, a replacement with
duktape is discussed on guix-devel, at least for polkit.

As a temporary resolution to the rebuild issue, we could pin the
dependencies of librsvg to some specific versions and only bump them
when something awful happens.  I'm not sure whether librsvg exposes any
of the Rust nastiness to its dependencies, ideally hoping that it would
not.

WDYT?