Re: pkg/55912: gstreamer1 incomplete package installation / failed build

[Aleksey Arens <aza.sea.agenda%gmail.com@localhost>]

Thank you for sharing this, Nia.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 4:50 AM nia <nia%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> [...]
>  Disabling introspection might break dependent packages if they're written
>  in scripting languages, AFAIK it's the way GObject stuff exposes bindings.
>
>  The decision to angrily add introspection options everywhere was made
>  some time ago, and maybe it's time to move on.
>

It is generally the case that not everyone would be needing the full
support for GNU's glib2 scripting.  I imagine, some huge desktop
environments would be needing this.  From reading Wikipedia on
GObject, and my prior experience with building GNOME on Linux, it
appears that GNOME would be needing introspection enabled for its
pygtk bindings.  From what I have observed, Qt and KDE do not strictly
need this functionality, nor the bulk of Qt and GTK applications.  For
me, the baseline would be Firefox, Emacs, Evince, and Okular.  Neither
of those are dependent on py-gtk, or python GObject bindings (I'm only
mentioning Python, because it was chosen to play a central role in
GNOME, if only de-facto).

Thus, please allow me to suggest that -- if only for the sake of
experiment -- the "introspection" option be introduced into the set of
packages required to build at least Firefox, Emacs, Evince, and
Okular, and a test of their functionality be performed.  If the test
succeeds, then the global PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS+= "-introspection" build
would be a reasonable default choice for a lean desktop workstation
setup.  Also, the global PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS+= "introspection" build
would be a basis for a full-blown desktop workstation setup, that
includes a desktop environment.  So far, only devel/pango needs a
little bit of work, and it is something that I am comfortable with
undertaking.

While I have not built KDE lately, I have reasons to suspect that it
also might not be reliant on the presence of "introspection" options.
Thus, a global PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS+= "introspection" build appears to
be only needed for GNOME (and its satellite GNOME-specific
applications... when they could not be built without GNOME libraries,
presumably).