Re: [gentoo-dev] x11-libs/lib*: wrong RDEPENDs bug

[Henry Gebhardt]

On Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:31:44 +0100
Rémi Cardona <remi@g.o> wrote:

> Le 28/12/2009 22:04, Fabio Erculiani a écrit :
> > On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 9:51 PM, David Leverton
> > <levertond@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> >> On Monday 28 December 2009 20:50:17 Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> >>> What all this has to do with the fact that they are just
> >>> build dependencies? Just wondering.
> >>
> >> They're not just build dependencies.  They're required to
> >> use the library in a certain way, namely to compile other
> >> programs against it.  As long as we don't have
> >> compile-against dependencies, the only correct way to
> >> express that is RDEPEND (and also DEPEND because
> >> they're /also/ needed to build the library itself).
> >
> > To me you are saying that DEPEND would work just fine. No?
>
> No, but I understand why you're insisting. It took us a few
> weeks to wrap our heads around this to understand it.
>
> Let's take an example (bug #228211 but there are dozens more).
>
> In this example, libfakekey does : #include <XTest.h>
>
> and its configure.ac checks for "xtst.pc". Both files are
> provided by x11-libs/libXtst so this dep is added to DEPEND and
> RDEPEND.
>
> The problem comes from libXtst's XTest.h which #includes
> <XInput.h> which was provided by x11-proto/inputproto [1].
>
> inputproto is/was a build-time dep of libXtst.
>  - libXtst _directly_ requires inputproto at build-time only
>  - libXtst _directly_ requires libXi at build-time and run-time
>
> However :
>  - requiring libXtst at build-time _also_ requires inputproto.
>
> For most users out there, this would never be a problem since
> most Gentoo users always keep build-time deps on their systems.
>
> The problem arises for people who only keep run-time deps,
> usually for binary packages. inputproto being a DEPEND-only dep
> of libXtst, binary users will never get inputproto when they
> build libfakekey.
>
> So there were 3 solutions :
>
> 1) add explicit deps in _all_ packages that DEPEND on libXtst
> to _also_ depend on inputproto even if they don't use it at all
> (most don't, they just use XTest functions).
>
> 2) add inputproto to libXtst's DEPEND and RDEPEND
>
> 3) modify EAPI to add a new *DEPEND variable to cater X's very
> special needs.

Isn't there a fourth solution?

4) add a USE-flag, say "devel", that, when enabled, allows
compiling programs against the package. x11-libs/libXtst would
have an RDEPEND like this:
RDEPEND="devel? x11-libs/inputproto"

Anything wrong with that?

~H