Bug#904077: postgis: Please make the sfcgal dependency optional/separate

[Landry Breuil]

Source: postgis
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream

Dear Maintainer,

sfcgal support was added upstream in https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/2254
and enabled by default in the debian package in 2.2. Previously, we only had
access to geos, which is small, selfcontained and lean.

unfortunately, the dependencies brought by sfcgal support are huge, via
libopenscenegraph it pulls lots of x11 bits, ffmpeg, qt..

I dont know if the problem should be reported against openscenegraph package or
sfcgal or postgis, but as an end user when i need to install liblwgeom/postgis
for basic postgis usage on a server, it saddens me to see all those
dependencies pulled.

Would it be possible to subpackage/split those dependencies so that one is not
forced to install all the kitchensink for basic postgis support ?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)