Specify runtime dependencies with propagated-inputs or wrapper scripts

[Léo Le Bouter]

Hello!

I often meet problems where some packages don't work out of the box
because they have some runtime dependencies like themes or third party
programs.

I solved these problems on occasion by making commits such as this: 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=00c1793ce8e2210e48b18422ea3e76da10541874
- which adds a wrapper script to "bin/chromium" and includes xdg-utils
in PATH variable.

It works but it's tedious to do for each and every binary in every
single package.

I see we also have a propagated-inputs field, which looks nice but for
some reason people advice against using it. For what reasons? It is not
as tedious as wrappers and I would really like to be able to specify
runtime dependencies of packages using it without problems.

I think we must find a solution to this runtime dependencies problem
that is better than wrapper scripts because they are very tedious to
create for every single binary in every single package.

Another recent example being that the caja package depends on dconf to
change it's settings, which is not installed by default when users use
window managers like sway.

Let's find a convenient solution here that would allow us to put an end
to these problems that affect many new users and remains obscure for
them that they would need to add additional packages in their
configuration (and which).

Léo

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