Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:46:37 +0000
To: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>, ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
From: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
Reply-To: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Package variants (options) in apk
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On Mon, 2019-12-02 at 16:03 -0500, Drew DeVault wrote:
> I don't mean to be a debbie-downer here, but I feel like if this is
> desirable to you then what you're looking for is Gentoo. I'm NACK on
> this feature for Alpine/apk.

The objective of the RFC isn't to turn Alpine into something like
Gentoo or Exherbo though - I don't want to propose adding variants to
every other package, but for the few ones where it really does matter
because we can't split functionality out, like with FF and Polkit and
then only for one/two variants. I don't doubt that having this would
lead to having more packages with variants (e.g. I'd like to have
NetworkManager with elogind support, but I'm sure lots want it without
elogind support).

> I think maybe a compromise could be APKBUILDs which have build-time
> configurability, kind of like what we already have for packages which
> can be bootstrapped (e.g. gcc).

Yes, the problem is that once we have build-time configurability we'd
either need apk to interface with abuild (to automatically rebuild the
package in your configuration on updates instead of downloading the
version from the binary repos, which IMHO is much more gentoo-y.), or
just have apk install the upstream version (which might break things if
you rely on a certain feature set) or pin the version (which might
cause you to be on an unsupported release).

> But I don't think that would find its
> way into the binary repos or ever be a mainstream feature,

Yes, having buildtime configurability seems a bit clunky and usually
isn't really used (see Void Linux' "vopts").

>  and I'm
> generally against it becoming a widespread habit in aports.

Yup, we shouldn't overuse it, but some configurability in the packages
would certainly easen accomendating for a broader range of systems.