Hi Kari,
I think I'd better leave this one to someone who knows more about Blender than me. HIP was already available as a Cycles renderer in the current version in unstable and I didn't see what difference it made if I built it with -DWITH_CYCLES_HIP_BINARIES=ON. It's multimedia team's call to enable the build option anyway. It makes me think that a wishlist bug has more weight if someone would describe what changing it enables but I'm not in a position to do so.
It seems that some recent version of Blender has adopted run-time
compilation of some sort and -DWITH_CYCLES_HIP_BINARIES=ON is no
longer required to use HIP for Cycles rendering. That's good
enough for me. I'll close out my bug, and instead propose that the
necessary packages be added as Suggests. Thanks for looking into
this.
Sincerely,
Cory Bloor