Bug#1051191: libsdl2: Please add stage1 profile to disable pipewire for bootstrap

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 04 Sep 2023 at 11:08:01 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> There is currently a circular build-dependency in src:libsdl2 with src:pipewire which
> makes bootstrapping libsdl2 hard. In order to ease the bootstrap, it would be useful
> if the build dependency on libpipewire-0.3-dev could be disabled with a build profile.
> 
> Could you add a "stage1" or "pkg.libsdl2.nopipewire" build profile to src:libsdl2?

This wouldn't be a "safe" build profile: the resulting binaries would
not be functionally equivalent to binaries of the same name built with
no special build profiles. It's OK to have "unsafe" build profiles if
there's no alternative, but it seems better to avoid them, because names
are interfaces and interfaces are names.

I'd prefer to break this circular dependency from the other end. If it's
possible to add nocheck and noinsttests profiles to pipewire (a similar
arrangement already exists in for example src:dbus), then pipewire would
lose its pipewire-tests binary package, which as far as I can tell is the
only one that depends on SDL, without affecting the contents of other
binary packages.

In fact, since the SDL manual test isn't run at build time, only packaged
to be run later, probably a noinsttests profile in pipewire would be
enough? (That would avoid having to remember how the logical operators
for combining build profiles work!)

    smcv