Re: Creating a formula for Homebrew

[dmitrii . pasechnik]

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).

If a project does not use git's submodules, noone wants an extra
complexity of submodules to be added to the build system just due to
the need for gnulib.
In some projects I am or was involved, it's basically the case that the code 
injected by
the gnulib-tool got committed into the tree, and blissfully forgotten
about. 

In one particular project (sagemath), the needed for autotools' iconv
support m4 etc. pieces of gnulib are scraped from gettext installations
(sic!) at bootstrap time. One advantage is that these about 100K of code don't 
clog the 
project's source tree.
Naturally, one would rather run gnulib-tool at bootstrap time.

As well, talking about "taking QA steps" does not inspire much confidence.
Stable, well-used, versions have obvious advantages.

> 
> Packaging gnulib through a packaging system would have the effect that its
> users see an older version of gnulib, without benefits - because whether
> someone invokes 'git clone' or 'brew', it's a network access in any case.

What counts is not merely network access, but the speed of 'git clone'.
A minimal "shallow" checkout of gnulib is about 80Mb, and it does not happen
instantly. 

We are in fact having a fight now over whether to check in the
iconv pieces produced by gnulib-tool into the source tree, or call gnulib-tool 
at bootstrap.
https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/34152

Dima
> 
> [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Brief-Overview.html
> [2] 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Steady-Development.html
>