externalized libraries - rationale for not optional

[Ian Monroe]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
> 2009/4/5 Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide at gmail.com>:
>> I'd like to hear the rationale for not making all the recently split
>> libraries not optional for people. So far what I've been told is that
>> amarok will compile without them, but functionality will appear
>> broken. I'd love to see these things be purely optional modules,
>> although not recommended disabled at the distro level (with maybe the
>> exception of damn small or something ;) ) but for distro's like
>> gentoo, being able to strip them out using use flags, or people just
>> building from source, it'd be great (without having broken bits of
>> UI).
>>
>> I'm just curious why amarok devs seem so against this.
>
> We are trying to provide a complete experience when using Amarok. I
> know you're going to come back and say something about "choice,
> choice, choice", but in reality it's the people that like to choose to
> disable functionality that come back and complain that the
> functionality that they are looking for doesn't exist.
>
> Making it worse, you get non-official packagers (who are awesome and
> do great jobs) who decide to create a package for themselves and then
> publish them. When they create custom packages and don't specify
> functionality which has been compiled in, it is us that cop the flack
> for the problems.
>
> Consider that two months ago most of our dependencies were actually
> bundled with Amarok proper. We've broken them out into taglib-extras,
> going for liblastfm etc.
>
> Why are you now so determined to have them as optional dependencies?
>
> fwiw - Amarok shouldn't appear broken if a plugin isn't found at
> runtime. It should behave nicely, and if you can show us where this
> happens I'm sure we'd be happy to fix where possible.

Unless the plugin is something like the SqlCollection. :) A huge chunk
of Amarok is a plugin now.

The bottom line is that you need a good justification to make
something optional. None of the new spinned-off libraries have
dependencies that Amarok doesn't already have. Something like GPod
that changes ABI once or twice a year or mp3tunes that requires
Qt-with-glib is another story.

Ian