[Libreoffice] --enable-automagic

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Wols Lists <antlists at youngman.org.uk> wrote:
> On 02/11/10 12:34, Rene Engelhard wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 09:10:23AM +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
>>> In particular, there's a page on the gentoo wiki (I've put a pointer to
>>> it in our development wiki) that says that automatically enabling things
>>> can be a packager's nightmare. They've only got to miss a "disable" for
>> True.
>>
>>> some weird option they happen to have installed, and next thing they
>>> know they've shipped a package that depends on this weird option - AND
>>> DOESN'T DOCUMENT THAT FACT!
>> This is not a big deal for runtime deps, both rpm and deb have mechanisms to
>> find out what libs executables/libs need and putting them into Depends.. If you
>> have a own system, you have to implement such stuff on your own anyways, so...
>
> I need to re-read that gentoo page (as a gentoo user I really ought to
> make sure I understand it :-)
>
> And not all distros use rpm/deb :-) the whole point of the gentoo page
> iiui is that upstream sometimes do silly things that makes their life
> difficult.
>> For build-dependencies you're right, that can get a nightmare. Or you
>> forget one option, and in a clean chroot the package is not installed -> feature
>> not there.
>> Or even worse, you get additional stuff in "unclean" chroots you didn't expect
>> and maybe don't even want.
>>
>>> That's why, imho, "disable-automagic" is important (and that's why it's
>>> called magic not matic :-). If that happens, it's now an upstream bug,
>>> not a silly packager. And it's easy for us to fix each option as we add
>>> it, not so easy for them to spot we've enabled something obscure.
>> Though, but a --enable/--dsiable-automagic is not senseful either.
>
> Sorry - I can't parse that :-) It's obvious you're German so something's
> got lost in the translation ...
>
> Norbert suggested a packager mode flag, but that's basically just a
> rename of this flag.

more a reversal of the default:

I see it as:
default is 'automagic=true' (more exactly 'not having --maintainer-mode')
and it do a best effort to build with what you have

that way a causal haker can do
./configure
and it does something sensible based on the environement.

if you want a speficifc distro-pattern use --with-distro= (which
whould disable the automagic things) (you can still override
individual by adding --with-xxx --enable-xxx etc.

if you want to pick exactly what you want: --maintainer-mode, with the
exhaustive list of everything that need choosing. (note: as a side
effect, when a new options show up, distro-profile will break... which
is a good thing, since distro maitainer should make a decision about
that new options... and that will certainly attract their attention
:-) )

LO dev can use --with-distro=LibreOfiiceDev, that will activate as
much thing as possible


>At the end of the day, the devs (quite reasonably)
> want everything to be on by default, packagers afaict want it off. Do we
> keep this flag, or rename it, or is there another way to do it?
>> Grüße/Regards,
>>
>> René
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
> _______________________________________________
> LibreOffice mailing list
> LibreOffice at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
>