From 461572cca8655d0a7590309f557149e8d3405932 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: =?UTF-8?q?Ludovic=20Court=C3=A8s?= Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2013 23:55:16 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] doc: Document installation of propagated inputs. * doc/guix.texi (Invoking guix-package): Document installation behavior with propagated inputs. --- doc/guix.texi | 10 ++++++++++ 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+) diff --git a/doc/guix.texi b/doc/guix.texi index 3fee24db50..9cb1431bf1 100644 --- a/doc/guix.texi +++ b/doc/guix.texi @@ -495,6 +495,16 @@ such as @code{guile-1.8.8}. In addition, @var{package} may contain a colon, followed by the name of one of the outputs of the package, as in @code{gcc:doc} or @code{binutils-2.22:lib}. +@cindex propagated inputs +Sometimes packages have @dfn{propagated inputs}: these are dependencies +that automatically get installed along with the required package. + +An example is the GNU MPC library: its C header files refer to those of +the GNU MPFR library, which in turn refer to those of the GMP library. +Thus, when installing MPC, the MPFR and GMP libraries also get installed +in the profile; removing MPC also removes MPFR and GMP---unless they had +also been explicitly installed independently. + @item --remove=@var{package} @itemx -r @var{package} Remove @var{package}.