Re: rust (build system) deficits

[John Soo]

Hi Hartmut,

> My point is less the work, but the non-transitive declarations:
nettle-sys is an multi-indirect input for sequioa-sqv, still the later
needs to specify these dependencies.

Totally agree. I think everyone agreed, too.  A few months ago we decided that 
the package inputs should match as close to exactly the dependencies listed in 
Cargo.toml so as to avoid specifying transitive dependencies in the package 
definition. 

The importer does solve the transitive dependencies but there is a bug. Version 
numbers of cargo dependencies are not used which can sometimes cause the 
problem you describe. I really hope the fixes get merged soon because it is a 
real pain. 

> This importer does not solve the declarations, and IMHO it should not
anyway - as the are dependencies of another packages, which might change over 
time.

I’m not sure I fully understand why the recursive importer should not solve the 
transitive dependencies. Could you elaborate further?

If you are suggesting that guix refresh won’t pick up the changes, then I think 
agree with you. That I believe is an artifact of using arguments rather than 
inputs to specify dependencies.

Kindly,

John