[Fedora-packaging] Filtering requires

[Brendan Jones]

Hi all

I have a library (suil [1]) currently under review [2] which enables 
audio software such as qtractor/ardour etc to instantiate LV2 audio 
plugins. Whilst not part of the LV2 specification, it is being 
maintained by the authors of LV2 and will obsolete slv2 which is what 
hosts currently use.

An instantiated plugin may use a different UI toolkit than the host and 
one of purposes of the suil library is to free the host application from 
unnecessary explicit runtime toolkit dependencies (Qt/Gtk only at this 
stage).

As it stands RPM automatic requires will pull in requires for both 
toolkits, so that any Qt host using suil will pull in Gtk and vice 
versa. Whilst on most systems these will be present anyway it may not 
always be the case nor desirable (and it kind of defeats what upstream 
have set out to achieve).

I can filter out the toolkit requires in suil which will solve the 
problem, but it leaves the maintainer (me for now) in a position of 
manually tracking changes in Qt/Gtk that may require a rebuild of suil.

Alternatively I could filter the requires on any hosts that use suil, 
(only one at this stage but inevitably more), but that again this is 
cumbersome as more and more hosts come onbooard.

The safest course is to leave the automatic requires alone, pull in both 
toolkits for every host and deal with it differently when/if asked but 
it doesn't sit *right* with me.

Any comments on the best way to handle this?

thanks,

Brendan


[1] http://drobilla.net/software/suil/
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=783825