Policy for Dependencies

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2015, Christoph Cullmann wrote:

> I think we must accept, that on neither Windows nor Mac we will have all dependencies available
> and that for many applications not all features are needed. There is no "packagers" for
> that operating systems, you need to provide the stuff you use yourself, just like you
> would do on Android/iOS.
>
> E.g. no, I doubt that Krita or Kate will suffer a lot, if we have no sound, nor will
> many 3rdparty applications. We can make the knotifications usage more optional, e.g.
> in kparts, or we can make the knotifications dependencies more optional.

I'll go further, and say that I simply don't want any dll's that aren't actually
adding a feature to Krita in my packages. I'm even building Qt myself to get rid
of things like dbus and openssl.

>
> Therefore I think less dependencies are needed to be called "portable" in that case.
>
> But that a side, for the dependencies itself, no matter if we target just one os or multiple,
> would the KDE_ENABLE_MINIMAL_DEPENDENCIES switch be a solution for the criticism raised?

That's really close to what I used to do with kdelibs4 and koffice/calligra. I
created a switch like that and had it cut out everything that wasn't needed.
The kdelibs always remained in my fork; I never tried to upstream it since it
was really hacky.

The calligra switch was public. In practice, it didn't give problems for
Linux because distributions always build with all dependencies enabled,
they wouldn't go and add -DTINY=ON.

Boudewijn