Re: skia for libreoffice

[Efraim Flashner]

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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