As you may know, librsvg 2.50 on ‘core-updates-frozen’ depends
on Rust.
However mrustc, which we use to build the first Rust compiler,
currently
only works on x86_64. This means that ~28% of the packages on
‘core-updates-frozen’ are x86_64-only (vs. ~15% on ‘master’).
Among these, the most problematic missing packages are desktop
environments: Xfce, GNOME, etc. So far our “pledge”, encoded in
‘etc/release-manifest.scm’, was that all the desktop
environments would
be available on x86_64 and i686, so that one could install Guix
System
just the same way on both. Currently this is no longer possible
on
‘core-updates-frozen’, and I think that’s a problem.
The patch below does something unorthodox: it reintroduces
librsvg 2.40
(written in C) and uses it selectively so we can have a desktop
environment with Xfce on i686. It’s not enough to get GDM
though;
there’s a couple of GNOME packages that depend on librsvg and I
haven’t
checked whether they work with the old librsvg.