[Slackbuilds-users] Jack policy

[Klaatu]

On Friday, December 13, 2019 11:53:36 AM B Watson wrote:
> On 11/28/19, Franzen <slackbuilds at schoepfer.info> wrote:
> > The previous posts showed that there is no better or discontinued jack,
> > to make a dependeing build work both seem to do the job.
> > 
> > For now, i'll change my builds to jack-audio-connection-kit, maybe the
> > last two other builds from other maintainer follow.
> 
> I'm the maintainer of both jack builds, I've been going through my (and
> some other peoples') builds that depend on jack-audio-connection-kit
> and checking them with jack2 instead.
> 
> Here's my idea of what to do: in the READMEs for both
> jack-audio-connection-kit and jack2, put a prominent notice that
> says something like "Note: jack2 is a direct drop-in replacement for
> jack-audio-connection-kit", and a short explanation of the differences.
> 
> Since there's no || operator in REQUIRES (and there probably
> never will be), users will have to learn that any time they see
> jack-audio-connection-kit as a dependency, jack2 can be used instead.
> It's not ideal, but it would be way more confusing for some builds
> to list jack-audio-connection-kit and others to list jack2 (literal
> following of the deps would mean they'd be mutually exclusive, when
> they're actually not).
> 
> Willy, and other reviewers, can I ask you guys to *not* put jack2 in
> REQUIRES? For consistency, if you have to add one of the jacks as a dep,
> add jack-audio-connection-kit. Anyone who's paying attention and reading
> the READMEs will see that they could use jack2 instead...  and anyone
> NOT paying attention will end up with the older JACK, but at least it
> will work.
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I agree that consistency is better than inconsistency.

However, I don't agree that jack-audio-connection-kit should be the implied 
default.

Why not just put the %README% flag and not list JACK at all in REQUIRES? That 
way, people are prompted to make their own decision.

I don't use any kind of dependency resolution parser, so I don't know how that 
would affect automated dependency tools, but I assume when they encounter a 
%README% flag they throw up a notice to the user. Besides, we make it clear 
that SBo doesn't support auto dependency resolvers anyway (and as I recall 
REQUIRES in .info was us throwing a bone to such tools in the first place, so 
we shouldn't feel like we have to make decisions based on their ability to 
remove decisions from the user).