Re: [lmi] PATCH: disable the of system libraries when building wx

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2020 13:50:16 +0000 Greg Chicares <gchicares@sbcglobal.net> 
wrote:

GC> Well...even though you don't object to my excluding a particular library,
GC> it creates extra work for you, because it necessitates maintaining your
GC> own branch. And perhaps it also means that lmi depends on a custom wx
GC> build, and can never use a prebuilt debian or cygwin wx package.

 This is my main concern about it, yes. I'd really like to use wx 3.2
packages when they become available in Debian/Ubuntu (hopefully next year).
I'd also like to produce standard DLLs compiled with gcc in wxWidgets own 
CI builds and use them for lmi ones because currently building wxWidgets
takes almost half of the lmi build run: looking at

https://github.com/vadz/lmi/runs/902597456?check_suite_focus=true

it took 14 minutes to do it, compared to less than 7 minutes for the lmi
build and less than 6 for lmi build with SO attributes (BTW, I didn't
realize the difference between these 2 would be so big). This could/should
probably be mitigated by building wxWidgets without optimizations, as I
don't think they matter for lmi and compiling with -O2 is much slower than
with -O0, but ideal would be to just use the official DLLs instead of
building them ourselves for these CI builds.

GC> And what is gained by excluding any of these libraries? FSF no longer
GC> cares about GIF because the US patent has expired:
GC>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.en.html#venuenote

 Yes, I think GIF is acceptable nowadays.

GC> As for that apple IEEE thing...

 I'll need to look into this before answering your questions below. I've
avoided doing it for 20+ years, but it seems the time has finally come to
dive into it. For now, I can only say that "Apple" is a red herring, AFAICS
this has nothing to do with neither Apple the company nor the platform. The
reason we have a separate option for disabling this is that this code uses
a different licence, that you need to separately accept, see

https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/v3.1.4/src/common/extended.c#L20,L33

AFAICS this licence doesn't really contradict anything, but it would still
be simpler if we could avoid using this code completely. I'll add this to
my TODO...

GC> and if that affects only apple operating systems, do I care?

 It affects all platforms.

GC> Does this package
GC>   https://packages.debian.org/source/stretch/wxwidgets3.0
GC> inhibit that apple thing 

 I don't see them doing it in configure options used here

https://salsa.debian.org/freewx-team/wx/-/blob/wx3.0-debian/debian/rules

so probably not, but I haven't checked exhaustively.

GC> I'm thinking maybe we should just get rid of
GC>   --disable-apple_ieee
GC>   --disable-gif
GC> for lmi.

 I definitely wouldn't object to doing this but, on their own, these
options are not a problem -- as long as we're building our private wx
anyhow, we can use whichever options we want for it. Getting rid of the
corresponding checks in wx_checks.cpp would be helpful, however.

[...PR 145...]
GC> Merged and pushed.

 Thanks!
VZ

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