How to announce new optional dependencies? [was: What KDE would like distributions to do]

[Richard Brown]

On Tue, 2016-03-22 at 03:31 +0100, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> One way to ensure new options get noticed is to enable them by
> default
> and make cmake fail in case they're not supported and - in that case
> -
> have the user explicitly disable them.
> With that, the *BSDs will have a couple of -DFROBNICATE=OFF lines in
> their package build scripts, but it also is immediately obvious that
> way which features they should ideally implement. And for Linux,
> distributions will investigate the build failure, find the missing
> depndency or other requirement and rather satisfy it instead of
> disabling the feature (and again, in that case we would have a
> visible
> flag in the build script).
> 
> It does make cmake scripts a bit more complex, but I think that's
> absolutely manageable.
> Cheers,
>     Matthias


Matthias,

Luca already expressed our displeasure with having to dig around cmake
results to figure out what additional dependencies are required

> > because of non-linux platforms
> >       - We expect Linux distributions to fulfill them
> 
> Then new dependencies should be communicated in advance, or when the
> tarballs 
> are made ready for a new (beta) release. Sometimes it's guesswork, or
> checking 
> the CMake output, which is not ideal with automated build systems.

If you go the route of putting even more logic in CMake, please only do
so with strong, clear, advance dependency communication in conjunction
with this change.

It's really a lot of hard work to retroactively figure this stuff out,
especially when you consider openSUSE does not ship only KDE, and we
have to work with many projects to make sure we can find some way of
making all of their dependencies working together.

Regards,
-- 
Richard Brown
Technical Lead - openQA
openSUSE Chairman
  
Phone +4991174053-361
SUSE Linux GmbH,  Maxfeldstr. 5,  D-90409 Nuernberg
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