Re: new image library "requirements"

[David Kastrup]

Nick Roberts <address@hidden> writes:

>  > > While there's a case to be made for "requiring" (without options) X
>  > > libraries or even jpeg /png, I think requiring these is kind of silly.
>  > > 
>  > > Tiff is fairly rarely used except in specialized applications.
>  > > 
>  > > The case with .gif is more vague, but it seems largely a legacy format,
>  > > and is getting more and more rare these days -- you see it on old web
>  > > sites, and people still use it for "animated" images (which emacs
>  > > doesn't support), but it seems kind of unusual to see it for the kind of
>  > > content which people might keep around.
>  > > 
>  > > At the least, I'd drop the "requirement" for tiff.
>  > > 
>  > 
>  > I asked the same thing, but David Kastrup was the only one who commented 
>  > (granted, the subject line was not about image libraries):
>
> Yes, where does it all end?  Emacs will build without alsa headers but
> presumably that leads to some loss of functionality (playing midi files,
> maybe?).  Should configure throw an error when these aren't found?

Maybe it should make a human-understandable report of missing
functionality at the very end of the configure run:

----  WARNING ----
The following functionalities will be missing in your compilation of
Emacs because of missing development libraries (specify
-without-FEATURE to omit warning about such a missing feature):

jpeg: used for displaying jpeg image files
tiff: used for displaying tiff image files
xpm: used for displaying xpm image files and color icons
alsa: used for playing sounds from within Emacs

-- 
David Kastrup