bug#46650: Extending package transformation options

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Sat, 20 Feb 2021 at 14:57, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Guix as returned by ‘guix pull’ and ‘guix time-machine’ depends on
> GnuTLS.  So here, we have a special case: to build Guix itself, you need
> to build GnuTLS first, and there’s no way to pass ‘--without-tests’ at
> that level.
>
> I’m not sure how to change that because unfortunately, ‘guix pull’ and
> ‘time-machine’ don’t even know that Guix depends on GnuTLS; only the
> target Guix knows about this.  :-/

If  «“guix pull” and ’time-machine’ don’t even know that Guix depends on
GnuTLS» and «to build Guix itself, you need to build GnuTLS first», how
does it work?  How does «you» know that they needs to build GnuTLS
first?

Well, I do not know if it is viable, one hack should to use the package
Guix to collect this missing knowledge.  Why is it not possible to build
all the package dependencies of Guix with the option --without-tests?


Cheers,
simon