Re: conversation submodule questions

[Christian Grothoff]

On 10/26/19 12:21 PM, Schanzenbach, Martin wrote:
>> On 26. Oct 2019, at 11:12, Christian Grothoff <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> On 10/26/19 10:16 AM, Schanzenbach, Martin wrote:
>>> Really? I am personally responsible for making all of the REST stuff 
>>> conditional, i.e. it gets
>>> built of you have the depencies, otherwise not. My proposal would be to 
>>> change this into:
>>>
>>> 1. Not build REST by default
>>> 2. Add an --enable-rest switch to build it
>>> 3. Make configure fail if dependencies are not met
>>>
>>> And do the same to conversation, auction, consensus et al. (maybe even fs).
>>> That way, we can even get rid of --enable-experimental. Which is ill 
>>> defined anyway.
>>> (Who knows what is build with that switch)
>>
>> I doubt that'll get rid of --enable-experimental, as the next thing
>> people will ask for is an --enable-all, followed by
>> --enable-all-without-experimental. Because experimental was primarily
>> for stuff that might not even _build_.
>>
>> I personally think it would be better to have --disable-rest and similar
>> flags, and by default try to build everything. Otherwise we'll end up
>> with people (not reading docs) saying that they wanted to run gnunet-foo
>> and couldn't find it (because they forgot --enable-foo). So better fail
>> if dependency libfoo is unavailable, and have --disable-foo for those
>> who deliberately don't want to build gnunet-foo because they don't want
>> it or don't have libfoo.  Plus, I'd keep --enable-experimental, as
>> that's for code we really don't think normal users should even play
>> around with yet.
>>
> 
> Yeah seems better for REST and most others, but conversation? Not everybody 
> wants to pull
> gst/pulse when installing the gnunet package (e.g. headless)

I think it is acceptable for headless installs to use a few configure
flags.  Ideally, if a dependency is not found, configure should suggest
the right disable flag. I'm thinking of something along these lines:

ERROR: libgst not found, cannot build conversation.
  Use --disable-conversation to build without libgst.

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