[gentoo-user] Modifying ebuilds, and dependency thoughts between hugin and luminance-hdr.

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

So, media-gfx/luminance-hdr uses hugin's align_image_stack by default.
Except the ebuild doesn't list a dependency on hugin. I tried
modifying its ebuild file to add the dependency, but Portage
complained about a failed digest verification. So I don't know how to
work around that.

Then there are some additional realizations I had.

1) Pulling in hugin pulls in gtk and a bunch of additional
dependencies. Luminance-hdr is a qt app; having a qt app trigger
pulling in gtk seems silly.
2) The tool that luminance-hdr needs is a CLI tool. It doesn't need
the GUI side of hugin. So it should be possible to build that hugin
tool without the rest of its GUI. Sounds like another USE flag, or
perhaps splitting align_image_stack into a separate ebuild and having
both luminance-hdr and hugin pull that in.
3) Luminance-hdr doesn't *need* hugin; it has a builtin tool that
fills the same role, but behaves a bit differently. It should be
perfectly possible to remove hugin's tool from the list of options,
based on a USE flag.

Now, both hugin and luminance-hdr are both tools I've messed with a
great deal...enough to be frustrated with aspects which lead me to
dive into their source code to try to fix things. I'm pretty confident
I could do just about all of it, code-wise and logic-wise. What I
don't know is anything about ebuild and app development on Gentoo.*

So...where do I go from here?

* This also comes in on my desire to play The Old Republic, but WINE
1.3.x has trouble with it. Day job as a Win32 coder comes in handy
here...

-- 
:wq