zstd and Mercurial packaging

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sending this email to reach out to packagers so we have time to address
> packaging concerns around zstd. I'm willing to make upstream changes to both
> Mercurial and python-zstandard to ease packaging issues. Please read the
> aforementioned commit messages to understand the vendoring decision and then
> let me know if there is anything I can do to make your life easier.

Very interesting work!

On Gentoo Linux, we definitely prefer unbundling vendored libraries.
For autotools build systems, we ideally get a --use-system-zstd or
similar that will disable usage of the bundled dependencies and use
the normal header and library path environment variable to find it.
I'm not really sure how that fits into distutils stuff, though.

Given the static linking requirements between python-zstd and zstd, an
easy improvement here would be to make the install of the bundled
python-zstd optional, so that our package manager could just install
the system python-zstd instead. In that case, it would be important
that a requirements.txt or similar lists the version of python-zstd
used, and ideally any changes to that version would also figure
prominently in future changelogs.

Cheers,

Dirkjan