Subject: bug#63331: Guile-GnuTLS/Git circular dependency

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2025 07:24:49 +0200

Hi.  I noticed this bug because it was mentioned in the guile-gnutls
packaging:

;; url-fetch is used here to avoid a circular dependency with
;; git-download, see https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63331
(method url-fetch)
(uri (string-append "mirror://gnu/gnutls/guile-gnutls-"
                    version ".tar.gz"))

I wonder if we couldn't use the 'git archive' guile-gnutls-vX.Y.Z-
src.tar.gz tarballs instead of the 'make dist' guile-gnutls-
X.Y.Z.tar.gz.  Is there a reason the 'make dist' tarball is prefered
here?

Both tarballs are published as release artifacts:

https://codeberg.org/guile-gnutls/guile-gnutls/releases

I opened a merge request to make this change, and it do seems to build,
but I would appreciate if someone could tell if adding
autoconf+automake as dependencies causes problems for a potentially
early bootstrap project like guile-gnutls?

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/1779

/Simon