Re: Creating a formula for Homebrew

[Sam James]

> On 25 Aug 2022, at 15:53, dmitrii.pasechnik@cs.ox.ac.uk wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 08, 2018 at 11:43:08AM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
>> Wesley Viana wrote:
>>> So I was wondering how to contribute by "packing" gnulib into a brew
>>> formula.
>> 
>> Packaging gnulib through a packaging system (such as Debian, pkg, BSD ports,
>> or brew) is, in the current state of things, not desirable.
>> 
>> Gnulib is a source code library [1], and, although the documentation states
>> that the user has the choice between using the git repo and stable releases 
>> [2],
>> there have not been such stable releases for 4 years. That is, everyone uses
>> the git repo. And we are taking QA steps to ensure a high quality of the
>> code in the git repo.
> 
> I don't think this is how gnulib is usually used, and that's why regular
> releases are badly needed.
> By the way, several Linux distributions, e.g. Debian and Gentoo, do provide
> gnulib packages (updated at random moments).

Note that while Gentoo does have a gnulib package, it's mostly there
for esoteric reasons, and we don't use it in builds of packages.

So, we don't use it in builds, but I wish we could.

I do wish there was a way to unbundle it but that would require
solid versioning of gnulib. Right now, there's often (seemingly)
API breaks which mean consumers have to be adapted.

Often, bugs occur in e.g. coreutils which involve patching
gnulib rather than coreutils itself. It's even more frustrating
when fixing a build failure on e.g. a new platform
that has its roots in gnulib and we have to patch every
single gnulib consumer until they: 1. pull down a new gnulib,
And 2. make new releases (which might be years).

Best,
sam

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