Question on what to do with optional module

[Josef Whiter]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 15:59 -0500, Josef Whiter wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> A package that I maintain, geany, can use vte in order to have a 
>> terminal in the editor.  Now geany loads it by using the equivalent of 
>> dl_open() on the library and then loading the symbols manually.  I 
>> recently patched geany to link in vte so it did not do this and then 
>> submitted it upstream.  Upstream rejected the patch, stating that they 
>> do not want geany to be dependent upon libvte, hence the dl_open() 
>> method of loading libvte, and that I shouldn't need vte-devel during the 
>> building of geany as its not required at build time, its optional at 
>> runtime.  So my question is this, should I leave the package as it is 
>> now, where it compiles in vte support, or should I remove vte-devel from 
>> the BuildRequires, fix geany so it will load fedora's libvte it ships 
>> with the vte package and make vte a Require?  Geany will run perfectly 
>> fine without vte, so I'm wondering what the appropriate course of action 
>> would be for this situation.  Thank you,
>>
>> Josef
>>     
>
>
> Why not keep the small patch to just s/libvte.so/libvte.so.9/ 
> and then add an explicit dependency on libvte.so.9 ?
>
>   
The problem unfortunately isn't that simple it seems.  Geany out of the 
box looks for libvte.so, libvte.so.4, libvte.so.8 and libvte.so.9, so it 
should be picking up, but its not.  Geany uses g_module_open("blah") in 
order to open the library, which should work but for some reason its 
not, so it looks like there is a problem with g_module_open() and 
resolving the appropriate library.  I think I will add the Require for 
vte, but I'm going to have to figure out why g_module_open() isn't 
picking the module up.

Josef