[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 112311] autotools build: Automagic dependencies for libxslt and geoclue

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112311





--- Comment #3 from Tobias Mueller <tobiasmue at gnome.org>  2013-03-13 20:37:52 PST ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing, because it makes it easier to accidentally compile WebKit with important features missing.
Hm. You are right that it "makes it easier". But at the same time, that's the feature. It makes it easier to compile WebKit. I spent a week to get it to compile. Time is still ticking. My point would be: The fewer hassles the better. And if a feature is wanted, the big configure summary is hard to miss. And one could as well raise a warning that feature X is not found and that compilation continues without, like it's currently done with the gamepad support.
I don't think that bailing out if optional dependencies are not satisfied is good behaviour. I don't recall having seen that anywhere else.

> I think that, if anything, we should continue on a path where there are fewer configurable bits at time goes on.
> 
heh. I have a patch ready that gets rid of the configuration for XSLT ;-)

So effectively we're talking about autodetecting geolocation which would not automatically be built if the library was not there. I can add a warning for that.

> Is the problem that it's difficult to find libxslt or that running configuration over and over again is tedious?

libxslt is easy, fortunately. But it's not only libxslt. I needed to get hold of 12 packages. One after another. Oh, that's the stuff on top, after the update-webkit-libs ran. I added that, and loads of other dependencies, to the optional jhbuild moduleset.
So it's not necessarily hard, but things do add up.
I don't actually know why I'm doing this to myself, but I'm confident that it's scary enough for some other people. So again: I believe the shorter the "time to webkit" is, the better.

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