Re: Gnumeric - too big

[Gordon Hart <who@which.net>]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 11:55:46AM -0400, Hall Stevenson wrote:

> Yeah, I picked a good example, didn't I ?? In fact, gnumeric may not
> have any sound capabilities at all. Maybe it does... Where esound
> comes in is that *another* package that gnumeric requires requires
> esound itself. Aren't dependencies great ?? ;-)


heh, yeah I thought that too.. but checking

packages.debian.org/gnumeric

I think most of the deps I listed are directly from gnumeric .. 
including sound.. (I'm assuming sub dependencies would not be listed
on the page like that)

> > > it would likely be more trouble than it's worth.
> >
> > certainly sounds like it :(
> 
> This leads to another question: If a "--disable-something" option is
> given to the ./configure script, is the Makefile dynamic in that it
> won't check for the file(s) that would normally take care of what's
> been disabled ?? Does that make sense ?? ;-)

Aah not sure what you mean by the Makefile being dynamic... the
configure script creates the Makefile, so if you --disable something
it should not check for it and *if* (and it can be a big if) the
source is well organised it should build without requiring anything
related to the things you disabled.. as in --disable-bonobo (for
example) should lead to #ifdefs removing any code or #includes related 
to bonobo ( bonobo.h and such ) and the makefile would not cause the
build to link against the lib ( -lbonobo ) .. I'm making the names 
up but, you know , roughly :)

Its not always that easy, since most developers won't test all 
combinations of the --disable and --enables.. its a lot of work, 
and can sometimes even mean writing code twice (with and without) ..

IIRC building Dia and Guppi from source lets you cut out some gnome deps
which is why I wondered originally...  but there is a limit. I think
gnumeric is probably too gnome'ified.