bug#18247: Cyclic dependencies in (gnu package *) modules

[Ludovic Courtès]

As a stop-gap measure, I’ve worked around the problem in commit d759cf6,
which removes the dependency from texinfo to gettext.

(Éric: I see one test failure in texi2html, which is a priori unrelated
to the change.  Could you check what’s going on?)

address@hidden skribis:

> In the short term, it might help to move (gnu packages gcc) into
> (gnu packages base), and more generally to avoid inheriting from
> imported packages, at least among modules that are likely to be
> involved in cycles, such as core modules.

Merging modules is not really satisfactory either.  :-/

Perhaps one possibility would be to reorganize base.scm so that
%final-inputs and things it depends on are thunked.

Another possibility, probably better, would be to split base into two
modules: one that exports the normal package definitions (the first page
of base.scm, in terms of C-x n p), and one that exports %final-inputs
and related stuff (the second page).  Normally the latter will not have
to be used directly, except by (guix build-system gnu) and related
stuff.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.