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mate-desktop / eom

An image viewer for MATE
http://www.mate-desktop.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
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eom -> libpeas ->gjs : can dependencies be reduced? #352

Closed rubyFeedback closed 5 days ago

rubyFeedback commented 5 days ago

Hey folks,

First, I compile most everything from source on my linux machine here.

I also compiled the latest stable of mate desktop, at the least the majority of the components.

Here is a copy/paste output from a commandline ruby script that tells me which versions are installed on the local computer (and another script tracks releases of new versions of mate etc...):

Mate-Desktop:             1.28.2
Mate-Utils:               1.28.0
Mate-Applets:             1.28.0
Mate-Common:              1.28.0
Mate-Control-Center:      1.28.0
Mate-Keyboard:            1.28.0
Mate-Media:               1.28.0
Mate-Mixer:               1.28.0
Mate-Notification Daemon: 1.28.1
Mate-Weather:             1.28.0
Mate-Panel:               1.28.4
Mate-Power-Manager:       1.28.0
Marco:                    1.28.1
Mate-Screensaver:         1.28.0
Atril:                    1.28.0
Eom:                      sh: line 1: eom: command not found
Pluma:                    sh: line 1: pluma: command not found
Engrampa:                 1.28.2
Caja:                     1.28.0
Caja-extensions:          1.28.0

So I have most things; eom and pluma not yet.

The latter two both require libpeas.

I check on the libpeas source tarball here:

https://download.gnome.org/sources/libpeas/?C=M;O=D

Latest stable is 2.0.5.

It requires gjs.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/gnome/gjs.html

I have some problems compiling gjs. Now, that can be solved I suppose, but I am doing this primarily to get eom and pluma to work.

My question is: are these dependency chains really necessary? Is javascript via gjs really required for eom and pluma? At the least for eom, where an image is shown (image viewer) as a primary function, it strikes me as strange that we need javascript. Could this be made into an optional dependency perhaps, and the check changed to "if gjs is not installed, notify the user, but continue to compile / configure it"?

I don't know the source well to understand whether javascript is required, but if it could be made optional that would be nice - it would have more flexibility.

(eom and pluma are not critical, so I can skip them anyway, but I also kind of want a "complete" mate-desktop as much as possible. That would also mean I get gjs installed eventually, of course, but often when I compile mate-desktop I bootstrap on a fresh computer, and then my mindset is more that I want mate-desktop quickly up-and-running and let it run for days to come. In that context it would be nice if eom and pluma would also work just fine.)

cwendling commented 5 days ago

MATE doesn't make libpeas, so we don't control how it manages its dependencies. However, libpeas is library that facilitate loading plugins, and especially plugins written in various languages (including Python and JavaScript). It probably could work just fine without the ability to load JS though.

This said, I just peeked at the source code, and it really seem to make it easy to disable through a build option, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libpeas/-/blob/main/meson.build?ref_type=heads#L123 and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libpeas/-/blob/main/meson_options.txt It looks like you just have to set the gjs option and you're good: meson configure -Dgjs=false or something like that.