[Qemu-discuss] libcacard, spice and distribution packaging guidelines

[Thomas Wouters]

Hi,

There seems to be a bit of a dependency loop between spice and qemu (libcacard).
I've been thinking about this for a while and was adviced to post this question 
on the mailinglist.

To enable spice support in qemu, spice has to be installed. But to install 
spice you'll need (by default) libcacard libraries.
As far as I can tell, these are provided by qemu, so you'll have to build qemu 
before you can install spice and rebuild qemu afterwards with spice support.

If I'm not mistaken, this is only required if you want to enable smartcard 
support in spice, though I don't know how often this feature is used.

The build instructions of spice suggest to get libcacard from 
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~alon/libcacard/ but this repository seems to be a 
bit outdated. http://spice-space.org/page/Building_Instructions

Could someone give some advice on how this could be handled in a clean way? 
e.g. instruct package maintainers to split libcacard into a separate package, 
or drop smartcard support by default.
I'm leaning more towards splitting libcacard into a separate package but since 
I'm not really sure how to do it, I would need some instructions on how split 
off libcacard.
I'm not looking for instructions on how to do the packaging since that's 
distribution specific but want to know if it's possible to only build the 
libcacard libraries.

I hope this question is not out of scope of the mailinglist and makes a bit of 
sense - at least to someone.

Best regards

Thomas