[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Revert "Autodetect libxcb."

[Clément Bœsch]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 10:40:47PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le septidi 17 pluviôse, an CCXXIII, Clement Boesch a écrit :
> > So after each release, packagers need to check the configure and make sure
> > there aren't new libraries that will randomly be linked to, and add new
> > flag to make sure it's disabled?
> 
> Well, yes, duh. That is exactly their job description. Well, that and fixing
> technical issues.
> 
> But of course, checking each new optional new feature and decide to enable
> or disable, that is what a maintainer is supposed to do.
> 

The logic is the following: you have a verbatim clean of all optional
dependencies, and the packager decides which optional one he wants to add.
So yeah indeed, he might be check for new optional feature to add.

Asking the packagers to monitor that the upstream project is not randomly
adding a huge dep for something optional by default (that he will have to
disable explicitly) is not a very nice attitude to adopt.

And again, if we start adding random optional dependencies, we should do
it for all the libraries to be consistent, whether that be on demand (sane
option) or automatically with disable capability (less sane but still
better than current inconsistent and unpredictable recent behaviour).

Our build system was relatively sane when we weren't pulling random
dependencies like this, and that's why packagers didn't complain much
about it. Changing that behaviour sneakily is not going to make us some
friends.

If we want auto-detect of libs like this, we must make sure this behaviour
is disable-able.

> Otherwise, how would the users benefit from the new features?
> 

Users would request the new feature. The distribution is all about control
of the dependencies and features.

> > They will miss some...
> 
> You can assume they have automated tools to detect dependency changes. Or
> more generally, you can assume they are proficient at what they do.
> 

This is distro specific and there are thousands out there.

-- 
Clément B.
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