[aur-general] Is it necessary to create a new package just for an dependency header

[Sebastian Lau]

Hi,

At the moment I'm trying to rewrite grive [1], because its maintainer
did not migrate it to the new Google APIs.
After reviewing the code, I decided, that maybe using the google api cpp
client libraries would be a good choice since the original author of
grive did implement similar things as the official google API[2] does.

So I created packages for those APIs in the AUR[3]. Everything fine so far.

The problem is, google is using an old version (3.7) of the simple
embedded webserver mongoose[4] as backend in its current stable
release[5]. I tried using the current version of mongoose, but the
developers have some functions removed that google uses. So I'm stuck
with using version 3.7 .

Since however cmake won't build shared libraries (even with
-DBUILD_SHARED=ON) of google-api-cpp-client, mongoose is already
statically linked into the libgoogleapis_mongoose.a . The only problem
is that one header of googleapis (mongoose_webserver.h) has the line
"#include <mongoose/mongoose.h>". No problem for compilation, but when
using the headers in an own project, there won't be any file at this place.
The mongoose 5 package in AUR installs its header to
'/usr/include/mongoose.h'.

So I'm stuck with the question wether
- to create a new package "mongoose3" for the header only since nothing
more is needed (more dependencies) and hope for google fixing that issue
with the next more current release
or
- just include the mongoose header in "/usr/include/mongoose3.h", patch
the include in google webserver to use that file and include the license
of mongoose version 3 in my google-api-cpp-client package.

Personally, I'd prefer the second conclusion since AFAIK no other
package needs this header and google is working on its web section on
the master branch, so it probably won't be needed anymore in near
future. But I'm not sure, so it would be nice to have your opinion on that.


Greets,

Sebastian



[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/grive/
[2] https://github.com/google/google-api-cpp-client/tree/v0.1
[3]
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&C=0&SeB=nd&K=google-api-cpp&outdated=&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go
[4] https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose
[5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/google-api-cpp-client/