Re: Dependency hell, again (was Re: dasher)

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:41 PM, Magnus Eriksson wrote:

> 
> I sent an email to Patrick off-list saying pretty much the exact same thing 
> that Geert said in his reply, and even with the same subject line. Thought it 
> would be off topic, but I guess not.
> 
> On Thu, 7 Jan 2010, Julio Merino wrote:
> 
>>>> The dasher README suggests that the Gnome depencies are optional
> ...
>>>> I tried ./configure --without-gnome but it still insisted on
> 
> ...
>>>  --disable-a11y
> ...
> 
>> And, please, please, if you want to make gnome dependencies optional,
>> create a new package, say dasher-gtk, which builds dasher without
>> gnome support.  Don't add a build option to dasher to disable these
>> dependencies.
> 
> I've tried to parse that paragraph a dozen times now, and I can't seem to 
> make sense of it unless I assume that either the writer or the reader is a 
> complete idiot.  Neither seems that likely, so could you clarify?
> 

As was explained to me, a while back, options in packages are bad, because you 
can't have binary packages for all possible settings.  A variant of the package 
-- perhaps with a Makefile.common -- with something like that set differently, 
solves that problem; there can be binaries of each variant.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb