Question for future Debian builds

[IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian/GNU)]

On 12/21/2015 02:04 PM, IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian/GNU) wrote:
> finally: embedding libraries is generally frowned upon, to eliminate
> duplicate work. so as long as giada were the only package using JUCE,
> embedding it would probably be OK, but once other applications start
> using it as well (a few come to my mind which i would probably like to
> package), it definitely should go into a separate package.

anyhow.
i just found out that JUCE is also distributed via github, and it seems
that there shouldn't be a problem *in principle* to package JUCE based
on github tags.
so i have filed an ITP [808611] for packaging JUCE in debian.

this *most* likely will mean that Debian will have a libjuce package,
that provides a libjuce.so dynamic library (unlike the canonical
upstream way that suggests including the source code).

and all applications using JUCE will have to link against this dynamic
library (in their Debian packages).

so if possible, i beg giada (and any other application planning to use
JUCE) to disentangle the JUCE integration as much as possible, to make
it easy to:
- use JUCE-headers found in a different (ideally configurable)
base-directory (e.g. /usr/include/juce/ rather than /path/to/giada/foo)
- allow to easily disable any built-in JUCE "binaries" (or c++-files)
and replace them with some linker flags..

in practice this might mean:
- keep JUCE in a submodule in your code
- use a build-variable to set the base include-path for juce
- group together the use of any JUCE-C++ files (ideally into something
like libtool's "convenience libraries", but anything that can kick the
building and usage of JUCE-C++ files out of the build-system with a
trivial patch (or none) would be ok
- allow adding of additional libraries to the linker (LDFLAGS, LIBS,...)

the above guideline assumes that it is impossible (for practical
reasons) to *not* include a copy of JUCE into giada itself.
if however, there is such a way, don't hesitate to walk it.

gfmdsar
IOhannes

[808611] https://bugs.debian.org/#808611