Needs additional system packages

[eserte]

Building Alien::Electron out of the box often does not work, because additional system packages are required. For example, on a debian/buster system I had to install libxss1 and libgconf-2-4 before successfully build & test Alien-Electron-0.200 (and maybe other required system packages were already installed on this system). On a Fedora28 the required packages were called libXScrnSaver and GConf2.

My questions:

• should Alien-Electron depend on other Alien packages which provide the missing packages (and these Alien modules probably have to be created first)?
• or should I just add the package dependencies to CPAN::Plugin::Sysdeps, so at least CPAN.pm users who use this plugin (probably very, very few) may install Alien::Electron out of the box?

[eserte]

Also required: libgtk-3.so.0

[hoytech]

Good questions! I'm not really sure how dependencies should be handledhere. Maybe @plicease has an idea?

[plicease]

There is some mechanism for specify other Aliens as dependencies with alienfile, I think Alien::Libarchive3 is the only one that uses it, so it may not have been tested as widely as some of the other features of AB (obviously I am eager to improve support here if/when we do find issues).

https://metacpan.org/source/PLICEASE/Alien-Libarchive3-0.29/alienfile#L48-50

There is no mechanism for Alien::Base::ModuleBuild based Aliens to handle it.

Personally I think it is preferable where possible for the Alien to use other Aliens as dependencies, as that will work with cpanm and other installers. On the other hand the complexity of writing a aliens for some dependencies should be taken into account, some packages are difficult to alienize or to resource/time intensive to reasonably be built in cpantesters or end users boxes. So I think this is a judgement call on the part of the individual Alien maintainer.