Policy for Dependencies

[Christoph Cullmann]

Hi,

in my quest to get Kate working on Mac (and Windows), I needed to patch some frameworks to have less
required dependencies.

e.g. doctools is a hassle on Windows and phonon is a hassle on both win/mac (if you don't require audio, like most applications won't)

Now there is a bit of controversy how to handle that right, see:

https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/125615/

Given we advertise our frameworks libs as suitable for 3rdparty developers (that most likely will need to bundle fixed version with their applications
on win/mac/linux), I think we should have as few required dependencies to external libraries as possible.

At the moment, it seems like most non-linux people just hack around that by doing manual patching of the CMake stuff and the code.

I would like to avoid that and have "plain" frameworks suitable for both usecase:

1) "Normal" deployment like we do in on Linux => just installing it with all features if possible.
2) "Application Bundles/Installer" like we will have to do it on Win/Mac and 3rdparty Linux people will need to do.

I think the easiest solution is to make stuff optional. That will avoid ugly "if (WIN OR APPLE OR ANDROID)".. hacks in CMake
and allow people to still build stuff with that deps on that operating systems if really wanted.

Greetings
Christoph

-- 
----------------------------- Dr.-Ing. Christoph Cullmann ---------
AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH      Email: cullmann at AbsInt.com
Science Park 1                         Tel:   +49-681-38360-22
66123 Saarbrücken                      Fax:   +49-681-38360-20
GERMANY                                WWW:   http://www.AbsInt.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Geschäftsführung: Dr.-Ing. Christian Ferdinand
Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Saarbrücken, HRB 11234