Optional vs Required Dependencies

[Maciej Mrozowski]

On Tuesday 15 of December 2009 16:40:18 Mike Arthur wrote:
> On 15 Dec 2009, at 15:17, David Faure wrote:
> > We already do that quite a lot.
> >
> > I assume you have some specific dependencies in mind,
> > because otherwise the answer is only "yes, we have both kinds of
> > dependencies already, see the output of cmake in a kde module".
> > I suggest that you tell us more about which required dependencies
> > you would like to see turned into optional ones.
> 
> I should have phrased myself better. I guess I meant to ask a question:
>  what makes something a required vs optional dependency? Obviously Qt is
>  required but beyond that I'm sure you could compile some parts of KDELibs
>  with nothing else and probably get something installable. Interested in
>  your thoughts.

It is actually very simple. Missing dependency that causes your cmake run 
(Makefile creation phase or configure phase) to bail out and refuses to 
generate Makefiles is mandatory dependency. Anything else is optional.
So if you run cmake <src_dir> and it does not fail - you're good to go.
This is true for everything that uses CMake, if it's not the case then 
particular buildsystem is broken and should be fixed.

For now, KDELibs (or KDE Development Platform) is meant to be 'atomic' so 
built all together. However, for some testing purposes, after configure phase 
you can navigate to <build_dir>/<subdir> you're most interested and run make 
&& make install there.

-- 
regards
MM