Effectively force all GNOME users to locally compile ZFS?

[Mark H Weaver]

Hello Guix,

Regarding the following commit, recently pushed to our 'master' branch:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
commit 61ccd756e5ff73b2f8dc3449df537f1c5adb5872
Author: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr>
Date:   Thu Jul 1 18:46:49 2021 +0200

    gnu: libvirt: Support ZFS.
    
    * gnu/packages/virtualization.scm (inputs): Add zfs.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

If I understand correctly, this will effectively force all GNOME users
to locally compile ZFS.  The reason is that our 'gnome' package depends
on 'gnome-boxes', which depends on 'libvirt', which now depends on
'zfs', and our 'zfs' package includes the following argument:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
   ;; The ZFS kernel module should not be downloaded since the license
   ;; terms don't allow for distributing it, only building it locally.
   #:substitutable? #f
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Am I mistaken?  Are there opinions about whether this is desirable?

Before the commit above, the only package that depended on 'zfs' was
'zfs-auto-snapshot', so presumably the only people who had to compile
ZFS were people who explicitly wanted ZFS.

      Regards,
        Mark