Bug 706372 – games-action/minetest headless server build pulls in X

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description William Breathitt Gray 2020-01-25 23:07:41 UTC]

Attempting to install a headless version of Minetest (USE="-client server") pulls in X despite no need for graphical display. This occurs since Minetest unconditionally depends on dev-games/irrlicht, which in turn requires virtual/opengl. Minetest only requires Irrlicht headers for headless builds.

There's two ways we could resolve it. Ideally, this should be resolved upstream by the removal of the Irrlicht dependency for headless server builds. I've opened an upstream Github issue before: <https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/8625>.

I believe the Irrlicht headers dependency was originally added to support fixed-width data types. However, C++ supports fixed-width data types with the standard <cstdint> header. I initially tried to write a patch to replace all the Irrlicht fixed-width data types to the <cstdint> fixed-width data types, but I ultimately abandoned the effort due to the drudgery entailed in changing so many files.

Alternatively, we could create a new dev-games/irrlicht-headers Gentoo   
package that will only install the Irrlicht headers. This will require   
us to find someone to maintain such a package.

[Comment 1 James Le Cuirot 2020-01-26 20:58:56 UTC]

I think it should be a separate package and one should depend on the other so they should be maintained together. However, I find it very odd that Minetest would only require the headers of a 3D engine, even when headless. Something smells off here.

[Comment 2 William Breathitt Gray 2020-01-26 21:11:32 UTC]

(In reply to James Le Cuirot from comment #1)
> I think it should be a separate package and one should depend on the other
> so they should be maintained together. However, I find it very odd that
> Minetest would only require the headers of a 3D engine, even when headless.
> Something smells off here.

I provide bit more in-depth investigation in the Minetest Github issue linked. My suspicion is that the original authors used the fixed-width data types in the Irrlicht headers out of convenience since they were already available due to the Irrlicht calls for the client code. Over the years, more and more of the code made use of these Irrlicht data types, so now it's become entrenched in the server code even though it's not necessary on a technical level.

I believe it's possible to remove the Irrlicht headers dependency, but it'll take someone with enough patience to go through the files and manually make the changes to clean them up.

For now, I'll create an dev-games/irrlicht-headers package and have the dev-games/irrlicht package depend on it. The games-action/minetest package can then have dev-games/irrlicht-headers be a dependency for the "server" USE flag, and dev-games/irrlicht be a dependency for the "client" USE flag.

[Comment 3 Larry the Git Cow 2020-02-22 21:08:43 UTC]

The bug has been referenced in the following commit(s):

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=bc29277a58895bda30cc956e5bd69e724df6c260

commit bc29277a58895bda30cc956e5bd69e724df6c260
Author:     William Breathitt Gray <[e-mail]>
AuthorDate: 2020-01-26 21:47:12 +0000
Commit:     James Le Cuirot <[e-mail]>
CommitDate: 2020-02-22 21:08:21 +0000

    dev-games/irrlicht-headers: New package
    
    Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/706372
    Package-Manager: Portage-2.3.84, Repoman-2.3.20
    Signed-off-by: William Breathitt Gray <[e-mail]>
    Closes: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/14464
    Signed-off-by: James Le Cuirot <[e-mail]>

 dev-games/irrlicht-headers/Manifest                |  2 +
 .../irrlicht-headers/irrlicht-headers-1.8.4.ebuild | 43 ++++++++++++++++++++++
 dev-games/irrlicht-headers/metadata.xml            | 11 ++++++
 3 files changed, 56 insertions(+)

[Comment 4 Larry the Git Cow 2020-02-22 22:10:07 UTC]

The bug has been closed via the following commit(s):

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=67e48324452090097bc8217613960376de657945

commit 67e48324452090097bc8217613960376de657945
Author:     William Breathitt Gray <[e-mail]>
AuthorDate: 2020-01-17 21:56:38 +0000
Commit:     James Le Cuirot <[e-mail]>
CommitDate: 2020-02-22 22:09:40 +0000

    games-action/minetest: Version bump to 5.1.1
    
    Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/706372
    Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/705696
    Package-Manager: Portage-2.3.84, Repoman-2.3.20
    Signed-off-by: William Breathitt Gray <[e-mail]>
    Closes: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/14370
    Signed-off-by: James Le Cuirot <[e-mail]>

 games-action/minetest/Manifest              |   1 +
 games-action/minetest/minetest-5.1.1.ebuild | 139 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 140 insertions(+)

[Comment 5 Larry the Git Cow 2022-02-10 12:19:51 UTC]

The bug has been referenced in the following commit(s):

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=7a53fe6c1af5bc45544030d77fa3b577013237ad

commit 7a53fe6c1af5bc45544030d77fa3b577013237ad
Author:     Marek Szuba <[e-mail]>
AuthorDate: 2022-02-10 11:55:52 +0000
Commit:     Marek Szuba <[e-mail]>
CommitDate: 2022-02-10 12:19:37 +0000

    dev-games/irrlicht-mt-headers: initial import
    
    Split off from dev-games/irrlicht-mt so that packages which require
    Irrlicht headers but not libraries, games-action/minetest[-client] for
    instance, do not have to unnecessarily pull in X libraries.
    
    Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/706372
    Signed-off-by: Marek Szuba <[e-mail]>

 dev-games/irrlicht-mt-headers/Manifest             |  1 +
 .../irrlicht-mt-headers-1.9.0.4.ebuild             | 30 ++++++++++++++++++++++
 dev-games/irrlicht-mt-headers/metadata.xml         | 11 ++++++++
 3 files changed, 42 insertions(+)