Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 10:24:38AM -0800, Eric Sandall wrote:
> I just saw an update to amarok's DEPENDS which added taglib as a dependency.
> amarok also depends on kdemultimedia, which optionally depends on taglib. 
> How
> can we get this sorted so that kdemultimedia wouldn't be compiled without
> taglib support (assuming taglib isn't installed), but then amarok is 
> compiled
> with taglib support (again, assuming the user just used the defaults)? 
> Should
> we even care about this kind of circumstance (which happens in other 
> packages
> as well)?
 
We definitely need a way to specify such subdepends in sorcery, i just
got two prometheus bugs caused by stuff like that. gst-player not
compiling because gst-plugins wasn't compiled with gconf support and
straw failing because gnome-python wasn't compiled with gtkhtml support.
The way i solved this problem with the ruby gnome2 bindings was
seperating them into many spells, but that only works if the package
allows it (gst-plugins and gnome-python2 don't easily allow it).

We'll run into this problem quite often, lots of spells already have it,
so we need an extension of sorcery depends.
Something like
depends gst-plugins:gconf,mad

Then cast could check whether gst-plugins was built with those two
optional_depends on and recompile it otherwise, changing the
optional_depends for them to yes.

I don't think there's a question whether we need this, we definitely do.
The behaviour of it is what needs to be discussed, should it
automatically recompile the stuff, setting the optional_depends to yes?
One thing about the automatic setting of optional_depends to yes needs
more work, sorcery shouldn't record those changes in
/var/state/sorcery/depends unless the user says yes when asked if he
really wants to cast the spells. Otherwise a user may try a spell, see
that it wants to recompile something big with changed optional_depends
and decides against it, but sorcery already recorded the changed
optional_depends, so the next time the spell is cast it will be
configured in a way the user didn't want to.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org