new features with no documentation

[ellie timoney]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2020, at 12:52 PM, Anatoli wrote:
> > chardet is used by the JMAP module of httpd to detect the character
> set of untagged 8-bit headers.
> 
> Does that mean that these libs are required? If not, what would happen
> if not included? How Cyrus would detect the charset? Or put in other
> words, if they are not required, what's the benefit to use them?
> 
> On the other hand, may I suggest to please add these details to the
> Compiling [1] page? There's already a lot of useful information, but
> some of the libs lack any details on what's their purpose in Cyrus and
> why they are beneficial/required (and if they are not used yet, maybe
> they shouldn't be mentioned there at all?). This could help porters and
> maintainers to make more educated decisions on how to package Cyrus.

libchardet is already listed on the compiling page as being used by the CalDAV, CardDAV, and/or JMAP features.  You would decide to install libchardet based on whether you need these features: if you don't enable these features, you don't need it; if you do, you probably do.

If you don't have libchardet, Cyrus will not do character-set detection.  If some piece of data has no character set coming in, it will have no character set.  I don't know why you would decide to not use this, and it may simply become a mandatory requirement for these features in 3.4.  It might have been mandatory in 3.2, if this had been brought to our attention during the nearly 3 month beta window; but now that it's in a stable release, it will remain as it is.

cld2 was used by one (or maybe both) of the experimental search features that were accidentally included in 3.2.0, and removed in 3.2.1 (see the release notes).  Looks like we forgot to remove the configure checks for the library when removing the feature(s) that used it.  You don't need it, and if you have it, it won't be used anyway.

Cheers,

ellie