On Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 05:48:14PM +0100, David Marchand wrote: > There is currently no way to know which libraries are optional. > Introduce a enable_libs option (close to what we have for drivers) so > that packagers or projects consuming DPDK can more easily select the > optional libraries that matter to them and disable other optional > libraries. > > Note: the enabled_libs variable is renamed for sake of consistency. > > Signed-off-by: David Marchand <david.march...@redhat.com> > --- This is the only patch of this set I would have some concerns about. I'm just not sure that it makes sense to have this option for libraries compared to drivers.
Specifically: * We have over 200 drivers in DPDK (rough count using find), of which 2 are mandatory, and therefore specifying just 1 or 2 that you want can make sense. * On the other hand, we have 53 libraries, of which only 7 or so (after this patchset) are optional. This means that use of the term "enable_libs" is misleading - at least to me - in that it's only a very small proportion of the libs which would be affected by that flag (compared to 99% of the drivers) * Also, while the number of mandatory drivers is unlikely to change much (since there are only 2), it should be fairly safe to do builds using "--enable-drivers". On the other hand, the list of libraries affected by "--enable-libs" is likely to change, so short of each user naming each and every lib they use (and each library those depend on), to the list, it's quite possible that any --enable-libs use could lead to a broken build in future if a library changes from mandatory to optional. Overall, I'm just concerned that this flag is premature, and would prefer to keep it just to the disable option until we are confident that out "optional library" list is relatively settled. /Bruce
