[aur-general] Packages that include other project code

[Eli Schwartz]

On 7/15/19 10:57 AM, Brett Cornwall via aur-general wrote:
> I'd like a sanity check!
> 
> Waybar has a dependency on a C++ logging library called spdlog. This 
> project depends on fmt and by default uses an included copy. I've raised 
> a ticket about removing this but it doesn't look like the developer is 
> interested [2].
> 
> In this case, I feel it expedient to patch out the logic to use the 
> bundled headers [2] and outright remove the directories [3]. Am I 
> correct in this conclusion or is this too far-reaching?
> 
> [1] https://github.com/gabime/spdlog/issues/1146
> [2] 
> https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/spdlog/trunk/rm_bundled_fmt.patch 
> 
> [3] 
> https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/spdlog#n50 

Upstream has an option to build using the system spdlog, which is 
perfectly reasonable. We should use that configure-time option.

There's no reason to also use downstream patches which can get out of 
date, just to remove source code that isn't used. Debian does this all 
the time, and it's one of the reasons it's so hard to understand 
anything at all about how Debian packages are constructed. Their 
rationale for doing so is, I think, that it offends their morality to 
know that the build system is at all capable of using vendored code.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User