skia for libreoffice

skia for libreoffice

[Nicolas Graves via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi!
(please tell me if I should use another channel for such questions)

I recently have been working on enabling tests for skia and including
skia in libreoffice (see bug 60571 for the first part).

Now that I delve into libreoffice's build of skia, I see that there's a
series of patches that libreoffice use for the build of the
library. Which makes me wonder if it's worth it packaging a
"skia-for-libreoffice" package variant, or if we should just add the
tarball in the external directory as it has been done with dtoa, and
rely on libreoffice's build of skia. In the end, both versions will end
up in the store in any case, because of the patches libreoffice needs.

What is Guix policy in this case?

-- 
Best regards,
Nicolas Graves

Re: skia for libreoffice

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Sun, Jan 08, 2023 at 12:21:55PM +0100, Nicolas Graves via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> (please tell me if I should use another channel for such questions)
> 
> I recently have been working on enabling tests for skia and including
> skia in libreoffice (see bug 60571 for the first part).
> 
> Now that I delve into libreoffice's build of skia, I see that there's a
> series of patches that libreoffice use for the build of the
> library. Which makes me wonder if it's worth it packaging a
> "skia-for-libreoffice" package variant, or if we should just add the
> tarball in the external directory as it has been done with dtoa, and
> rely on libreoffice's build of skia. In the end, both versions will end
> up in the store in any case, because of the patches libreoffice needs.
> 
> What is Guix policy in this case?

It's a toss-up. skia-for-libreoffice wouldn't see any use outside of
libreoffice since it's specific patches and not a different version of
the library. In those cases (especially if the library is maintained
upstream by the same people, which I don't think is the case here) we're
far more lenient on leaving it bundled. On the other hand, separating it
out would decrease the build time for libreoffice, which would be a Good
Thing™.

IF (and I mean it) you can separate it out easily and it doesn't make
building libreoffice with it then go ahead and do so, especially if the
version and/or patches don't change regularly. Otherwise I'd consider
adding a note in libreoffice's snippet (assuming it has one) or
configure-flags about why we're not using an unbundled version.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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