Passing an arbitrary string as option

[Max13]

I can't find how to pass an arbitrary string as an option (cf: Homebrew/brew#1803), apparently, ARGV can't be used anymore.

I'm writing a formula that depends on Qt, and the user should be able to provide his own installation instead of installing the runtime by homebrew.

Thanks for your help

[SMillerDev]

I'm writing a formula that depends on Qt, and the user should be able to provide his own installation instead of installing the runtime by homebrew.

Asside from the option string issue you're encounter, almost everything in brew is working to prevent brew from doing this because it makes builds really unreliable.

[Max13]

almost everything in brew is working to prevent brew from doing this because it makes builds really unreliable.

I understand, but when you need my lib being built against the current installed Qt, to use it then with an app you are writing with Qt, then how would the user indicate his currently installed Qt instead of reinstalling one from Homebrew?

[SMillerDev]

Well, if you don't want homebrew to manage the packages I would just avoid homebrew altogether.

[Max13]

So I understand there is no way? I'm using brew for the easy build process, once the formula is written, it's (virtually) frozen. Is there a workaround?

I have a formula with either Qt or Boost, but there is no sense in letting brew build my libs with a formula while the final app will be bound with another 😕

If you confirm there is no way, then I won't insist.

Thanks

[SMillerDev]

I'm not a hundred percent sure there is no way. But I do know that this is something we try very hard to avoid in homebrew because it makes building software reliably very difficult.

[carlocab]

I have a formula with either Qt or Boost, but there is no sense in letting brew build my libs with a formula while the final app will be bound with another 😕

You can use :optional and/or :recommended, for this. For example:

depends_on "boost" => :recommended
depends_on "qt" => :optional

This will build your formula with boost and without qt. To do the reverse, a user can pass brew install --with-qt --without-boost. You can probably make the --without-boost implied by --with-qt if you make judicious use of build.with?("qt").

If you want users to build with a custom version of Qt, one thing that might work is to ask users to symlink their Qt installation prefix into /tmp/custom-qt and then add that path to the include and library search path using C[PP,XX]FLAGS, which you can probably gate behind a custom option (e.g. --with-custom-qt). Not 100% sure this will work, though.