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

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

The following reply was made to PR pkg/55912; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Aleksey Arens <aza.sea.agenda%gmail.com@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Cc: pkg-manager%netbsd.org@localhost, gnats-admin%netbsd.org@localhost, pkgsrc-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: Re: pkg/55912: gstreamer1 incomplete package installation / failed build
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2021 05:07:49 -0800

 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).