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

[Andreas Guldstrand]

On 6 November 2016 at 13:31, Erik Hanson <erik at slackbuilds.org> wrote:
> No. Discussions are fine, we've made changes based on public
> discourse in the past. What appears before us is a handful of people
> really want to write some tool that plows through optional deps
> automatically. They don't want to read the README files, or maybe
> they don't need to, but I feel it's a bad idea to let EVERYBODY off
> the hook when it comes to the READMEs.

I'm sorry, but there are only two tools where anyone has mentioned
support for this field in this thread (unless I missed something), and
those are sbotools and slackrepo, and for slackrepo it was explicitly
stated that the author would in fact *not* add any kind of support for
these fields, and I myself mentioned I could see adding support for it
in sbotools. However, you seem to believe "adding support" would
necessarily entail skipping READMEs, but as the current maintainer of
sbotools I can tell you that that would be absolutely wrong.
Currently, sbotools does allow you to skip reading README files, but
then it turns off all dependency resolution for you.

Adding support for an OPTIONAL field would not in any way change this.
In fact, the way I envision adding support for this kind of thing goes
like this:

sboinstall <package-with-some-optional-deps>
=> <shows README>
=>
=> This slackbuild contains optional dependencies.
=> Please read the README before continuing.
=> Would you also like to include some of them? [y/N]
...