Re: [Doxygen-develop] CMake

[Anthony F. <ant...@gm...>]

Robert, Markus, all --

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Markus Geimer <mg...@we...> wrote:
> Robert,
>
>> The only other thing I can suggest to remedy the dependencies problem
>> is to bundle all dependency source code with Doxygen and build it
>> along with everything else, much like you already do for libmd5. This
>> also would include any dependencies of dependencies, transitively.
>> This doesn't seem like it would be too big of a deal except for QT,
>> which is pretty huge. Thoughts?
>
> I strongly recommend to *not* create such a monster tarball because of
> various reasons:

I very strongly concur.

Robert's proposal (create private copies of everything) was the route
taken by Chromium.  Getting it accepted into Fedora has been delayed
for years because the original packagers did not use the libraries
already available on the platform.

(Not to mention the fact that, with the "monster tarball" approach,
you also need to keep up with security patches for all of those
programs you copied...)

More info on this particular case here:
http://ostatic.com/blog/making-projects-easier-to-package-why-chromium-isnt-in-fedora

> My recommendation would be to stick to proven best practices: Let the
> configure step try to determine whether an appropriate version of a
> dependency library is installed on the system, use it if available,
> and complain (or disable optional functionality) otherwise.

+1.

I can't believe that CMake doesn't have this capability already, even
if it's in the guise of "is this symbol available from any known
library on the system?"

Either way, I do wish Robert luck; CMake has the potential to improve
cross-platform projects quite a bit, but I agree with Markus that
bringing in tarballs of dependencies is not the right way.

Best regards,
Anthony Foiani