[Nix-dev] Ideas for systematically avoiding unwanted runtime dependencies

[Kosyrev Serge]

Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com> writes:
> Regardless of specifics, individual packages can
> usually be fixed to reduce their runtime footprint, but I'm looking
> for ideas for how to do so in a systematic manner, so we don't just
> notice these things by accident and fix them one by one. Does anyone
> have any thoughts?

Instead of practical solutions I'm going to provide some serious handwaving,
but here it goes, for what it's worth.

One way would be to make the problem observable.

That is -- figure out a way to make a visualization of the dep graph
fancy enough, that the unnatural deps are seen right away.

..and make it easy enough to use it becomes a common tool.


Another approach would be a system of assertions, that would be able to
express things like:

 1. "packages in the set, defined by this expression, should never have
     these runtime deps"
 2. "this package should never have a runtime closure larger than X"

-- 
с уважениeм / respectfully,
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