Comment 8 for bug 1037311

On 17 August 2012 17:59, Patrick Farrell <email address hidden> wrote:
> Personally, I think checking it only at runtime is a poor user
> experience. (But I think the general opinion disagrees with me.)
>

It reasonable to check at runtime because:

1. The package is not always required. It's need for JIT compilation
only, so it would be best not to demand that it's installed. Most
users will you JIT, but they are many reasonable usage cases that
won't need JIT.

2. It's consistent with typical Python module handling.

3. The build system is already complicated (they always are), so the
more we can reasonably keep out of the build system the better.

Garth

> It's surprising for a user to compile dolfin from source, get a success
> message, and then try to use it only to find that you still need to
> install more stuff. From a user's perspective, build dependencies and
> runtime dependencies are just dependencies. It doesn't particularly
> matter for the user experience how that dependency is used, it only
> matters that the user needs to install it before they can actually get
> on with whatever they really want to do. I had thought that I had done
> all the boring installation work, and then I found out that I actually
> hadn't.
>
> It might be useful to have a warning at configure time that not all
> runtime dependencies are met (but still go ahead and build)?
>
> --
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> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1037311
>
> Title:
> cmake configure doesn't look for python-ply
>
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