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libretro / swanstation

GNU General Public License v3.0
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Use system dependencies #112

Open guijan opened 3 months ago

guijan commented 3 months ago

No system wants to package a program that has dependencies baked into the source tree. It's a nightmare to deal with for package maintainers, they don't want to contribute fixes upstream and still experience bugs that were already fixed because they didn't make it to copies of the code, or to find and patch all copies of the same code that all suffer from the latest security vulnerability, among other issues.

It's bad for users too because programs that compile on many platforms are few and it's common for the packaged version of a library to need patches to get it to build. If this program can't use the system versions of its libraries, anyone compiling it has to go figure out how to get those fixes in the local copy of the source code.

Please provide an option to use system versions of dependencies. I suggest also making it the default without an automatic fallback, as users should try installing the dependencies before using the local copy. This should also reduce overall memory usage and compile times.

DarthMew commented 3 months ago

I believe @LibretroAdmin can provide a much better answer than I can regarding why it is the way it is.