Default behaviour for including plugins

[Christoph Cullmann]

On 2019-07-26 17:40, Daan De Meyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was thinking about the best way to handle plugin building during
> further refactoring of the CMake scripts. Right now, some stuff is
> built implicitly depending on whether certain libraries are found or
> not (see addons/CMakeLists.txt). I was wondering if this shouldn't be
> made explicit instead, with each plugin either being turned on/off
> explicitly in the CMake script which determines whether it gets built
> or not.
> 
> Making building of plugins explicit prevents hard to trace builds
> where a default build succeeds on two machines but may differ in
> features from one machine to another depending on what other libraries
> are installed.
> 
> To achieve this, I could add an optional second parameter to
> `ecm_add_optional_subdirectory` which takes ON/OFF as its value (just
> like CMake's `option` command) and initializes the default value of
> `ecm_add_optional_subdirectory`'s `BUILD_${_dir}` to that value. The
> optional value would default to `ON` if not provided to keep backwards
> compatibility.
> 
> Most plugins would be enabled by default so as  to not change anything
> substantial for users but some plugins with more exotic dependencies
> might be disabled by default instead.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Hi,

I would strongly prefer the current way. You get info which optional 
stuff is missing, no need to hide some plugins per default.

Optional dependencies are common and people are used to check for that 
output but not to search for some "please enable this plugin" extra 
switches.

Greetings
Christoph

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daan

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