[Windows] What do I use Flashfetch for?

[vvirtues]

when installing the scoop binary, there's fastfetch and flashfetch. According to hyperfine, fastfetch is faster

[CarterLi]

Always use fastfetch. Flashfetch is meant to be used for compiling from source, and I actually considering removing it from release artifacts because of possible confussion.

[CarterLi]

Source code of flashfetch: https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch/blob/dev/src/flashfetch.c. It compiles the configuration of fastfetch statically in the binary, for people who want to save the short time of config file parsing.

Could you elaborate on that

A lot packaging script expects fastfetch ships flashfetch binary for historical reasons. I don't want to break them.

If people shouldn't use it, that sounds like a good idea indeed.

If they know what they are doing they can use it of course. For people who don't know what flashfetch is, they should always use fastfetch.

[Antiz96]

Alright, makes more sense now. Thanks a lot :)

Since the Arch packaging script doesn't necessarily expects the flashfetch binary to be shipped and the package itself provides pre-built binaries anyway, I think it makes little to no sense building and shipping flashfetch then. Makes sense to drop flashfetch from the Arch package right?

[CarterLi]

Yeah

[Antiz96]

Turns out that not building flashfetch creates extra annoyances from a packaging standpoint.

Targeting specific targets with cmake build (to exclude flashfetch) instead of simply building everything forces you to be explicit about the targets you want (e.g. cmake --build build vs cmake --build build --target fastfetch --target fastfetch-test-list --target fastfetch-test-format --target fastfetch-test-strbuf) which is both not convenient and eventually not future proof when you need test scripts (in case one is ever added or removed in the future for instance, which would imply to manually update the target list accordingly).

It also prevents the use of cmake --install as it actually expects the presence of flashfetch when installing stuff to DESTDIR.

I'm not completely familiar with cmake so excuse me if I'm saying something dumb, but would a build option such as -DBUILD_FLASHFETCH='ON'/'OFF' to "automagically" exclude it from the built targets and ignore it in cmake_install.cmake would be doable?

[Antiz96]

I'm not completely familiar with cmake so excuse me if I'm saying something dumb, but would a build option such as -DBUILD_FLASHFETCH='ON'/'OFF' to "automagically" exclude it from the built targets and ignore it in cmake_install.cmake would be doable?

I proposed a patch for the above at #1455 :)