On 01-21-16, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
In short, the distinction between ‘native-inputs’ and ‘inputs’ exists
solely because Guix supports cross-compilation. Otherwise it would be
unneeded.
Propagated inputs are a way to manually say: “I want this package to
automatically pull in those other packages.” This is necessary in the
cases given above.
Does this clarify the rationale?
I believe I understand what they mean and how they solve the problem. My
question is more "why autodetect runtime dependencies"?