Re: conversation submodule questions

[ng0]

Christian Grothoff transcribed 4.1K bytes:
> 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.
> 
Yes, I found the total lack of switches for conversation weird.
See the other email I've sent, I'll work some more switches
into the configure.ac before the release.