Build system should not assume everything is vendored and bundled

[jmoraleda]

I think this project should update build system so that it does not assume everything is vendored and bundled. It should support normal methods (such as pkg-config) to detect the required dependencies when they are provided by the system and build using them and install using normal methods.

Preliminary work has been done in #191 but more work is needed.

This is a feature request not a bug report.

Rationale

This feature would make it much easier for either the maintainers of the project, or downstream distributions, to package and distribute this project in a variety of binary formats.

To my knowledge this feature was first suggested a year ago in a comment #198 (comment) but I think the feature should be discussed by itself regardless of which binary formats the project chooses to distribute as no one binary format will be universally acceptable to everyone, including #579.

[alerque]

Definitely.

[Murmele]

@jmoraleda I agree with you. One big topic is libgit2 where we are using currently a custom branch and not the upstream branch (#153 ongoing work and patches submitted as PR upstream). I think for the rest only the options must be changed from OFF to ON as it is done in the AUR build (https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=gittyup)

[mwerle]

Just came here to post the same ticket, glad to see it's already being discussed and that upstream is amenable to this.

As regards patches to libgit2 - that will take a LONG time to filter through to released distros unless they are critical security vulnerabilities. Are the custom changes to libgit2 really that necessary or just "nice to have"?

[Murmele]

Just came here to post the same ticket, glad to see it's already being discussed and that upstream is amenable to this.

As regards patches to libgit2 - that will take a LONG time to filter through to released distros unless they are critical security vulnerabilities. Are the custom changes to libgit2 really that necessary or just "nice to have"?

Some of the libgit2 are neccessary, some are already merged. For some I did not understand why they are needed.
A summary can be found here: #153

[mmuman]

I second that: trying to port things to Haiku in a VM and always having to move things around to make space for gigabytes of dependencies as submodules when we already have them packaged is… annoying. At least there are less hardcoded ones than gitahead already.