It’s probably one of the most annoying things in the world. But it’s also one of the most useful. That’s at least what I think. I started some time ago by writing maintainers’ guides to my packages, so that people who would consider handling them when I’m occupied would know the main problems with them.
This month I also wrote a guide to fix failures with –as-needed flag (with a description of what it does and why it’s useful), and put that under qa’s project (thanks Sven for allowing me to). Yesterday night, after seeing pinentry dying because of being linked to libcap also if not requested (a fixed ebuild is in my overlay, it’s also reported on bugzilla), and looking at vsftp doing basically the same, I thought it was the case of writing something about automagic dependencies, too.
So I did, I fired up my Kate and wrote a new guide, always in GuideXML, about it, and can be found again in qa project, that I’ve also updated to put a reference to the two guides (the –as-needed one was unlinked before, a part some of my entries and a few mails).
I also tried to explain the reasons why automagic dependencies are bad for source-based distributions because I often found myself explaining that to upstream developers to get my patches applied, now I can actually point them to the guide, as I’ve done lately for the –as-needed patches.
What should I write next? I still have some notes about a parallel make fixing guide, that might come useful, as I found myself explaining that yesterday, too, but it contains lots of vague things, special cases like Qt’s moc files and libtools linkings and double-file commands….
Another thing that might come useful is a guide to autotools failures fixing, that explain how to resolve problems like missing macros and stuff.
You’ll see today or tomorrow if I’m going to write something about them 😉
Ah I also wanted to throw a stone in the lake in gentoo-dev, by asking if LINGUAS variables should be set in IUSE, as Donnie is doing for INPUT_DEVICES and VIDEO_CARDS in xorg-x11. It might be hilarious to see what comes out of it, but whatever the result is, I’m going to improve LINGUAS support in some kde-extra packages, so that they won’t build tons of extra po files and documentation for languages that aren’t used (why I have so much po files for Kaffeine!? :P).
