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

[Christoph Willing]

On 25/10/16 08:46, Andrzej Telszewski wrote:
>
> Most probably what the supporters of OPTIONAL think of, is that this
> field would contain all the possible software that might be added to
> broaden the capabilities of the package, but is not absolutely necessary
> to compile/run the package.
>
> Basically, it's all about moving/duplicating the information about
> optional packages from README to .info.
>
> The OPTIONAL filed already exists, it's just in a format that is not
> possible to parse by machines. I.e. they cannot understand README ;-)
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Exactly, it's for the build tools. They can store externally what
> optional packages have been chosen and work according to that.
>
Could you give a small example of how you see that working? It seems 
like there would be yet another layer of configuration needed (albeit as 
part of the build tool setup, I guess) to distinguish between all the 
possible optional packages and those that a user may want to actually use.

I'm not trying to be contrary (I mentioned previously that I already use 
additional .info fields myself); just interested.

chris