Arch Linux

dimich

Member

From: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-11-03

Posts: 710

Arch policy for features of libraries in official repo

Many libraries allow to switch one or another feature at build time. Is there any policy or guideline defining what features should™ be enabled or disabled in libraries provided by official repo?

For example, I develop an application using libcoap. There is official extra/libcoap package. However, it provides only headers, static library and cmake metadata. No shared objects, no pkg-config metadata, no executables for debug.
It's not a show stopper, I built custom package with all required features enabled. However, it would be nice to have all that in a single package from official repo.

Similar but more complex story with wolfssl. There is extra/wolfssl, but it lacks support of some features like DTLS 1.3. I could build custom package, but I have to change prefix to something else than /usr/ or change basenames to avoid conflicts with existing library files. Or use conflicts= and provides= in custom PKGBUILD and replace official package because wolfss is an implicit dependency for some other official packages I have installed. Wolfssl has BUILD_DISTRO option (--enable-distro) but it is not enabled in the package for some reason.

Would it be too bold to create feature requests for such packages if requested features aren't needed by any other official package? Or should I continue to use custom modified packages installed in parallel or instead of official ones?