[Slackbuilds-users] OPTIONAL field [was: qemu/spice-gtk and usbredir]

[Christoph Willing]

On 25/10/16 01:37, Franzen wrote:
> On 23.10.2016 12:36, Andrzej Telszewski wrote:
>> On 23/10/16 01:56, Christoph Willing wrote:
>>> Who is going to decide REQUIRED vs OPTIONAL for the many (I suspect) non
>>> obvious cases? Presumably the maintainer. If a maintainer's balance of
>>> REQUIRED/OPTIONAL deps doesn't suit someone else's particular
>>> needs/wants, then the builder will have to change their personal .info
>>> files anyway (or complain to the maintainer).
>>
>> I think the problem of REQUIRED vs OPTIONAL has been solved long time
>> ago.
>> It's the maintainer that decides what is placed in REQUIRED and most
>> probably 99% of us just installs what is there.
>> And most probably 99% of the time what is placed in the REQUIRED is what
>> is ABSOLUTELY necessary to compile the software or to run it (run time
>> dependency).
>>
>> Everything else, i.e. things that could be added later on or are
>> detected during compilation, are OPTIONAL.
>>
>> I'm the supporter of the OPTIONAL field and I actually proposed it
>> sometime ago, but it was rejected too.
>>
>> I think there is too big resistance here for this addition, because
>> naturally it would involve work.
>
> I think maintaining Options in README is about the same work as
> providing an Options field in the Info-file.
>
> Looking at https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/multimedia/ffmpeg/ ,
> it felt much better to see this list in in an OPTIONAL field in, which
> would also be parsable by tools like sbotools.
>
Because ffmpeg has so many options, it is a good example of the problem 
to decide which to include. Some people want a mean & lean ffmpeg with 
minimal options, while others want the lot. Even with a new OPTIONAL 
field, which options would be included in it that would please everyone? 
Each builder will probably modify to suit themselves.

Of course everyone already has that option - to modify the .info file 
with any additional fields they want. For ffmpeg I add:
     ENVOPTS="LAME=yes X264=yes CELT=yes ..."
My build tool finds ENVOPTS and exports each of the variables found, 
triggering the desired options already supplied in the ffmpeg.SlackBuild 
file.

However the maintainer can't know what options I want. They could put 
all the possible options in a new OPTIONAL field but perhaps I don't 
want _all_ of them; just some of them. Then I, the builder, would still 
have to make the changes to suit my own needs/desires, so what has been 
gained?

Anyway, whatever the mechanism is used, its up to the various build 
tools to actually support it. Maybe one of the public build tools will 
introduce something of their own just to see if it catches on.

chris