[C++][Parquet] Remove PARQUET_MINIMAL_DEPENDENCY

[pitrou]

Describe the enhancement requested

The CMake option PARQUET_MINIMAL_DEPENDENCY was introduced 8 years ago in apache/parquet-cpp#279, but it does not seem tested or documented anywhere. A GitHub code search does not yield many occurrences and most of them seem to be outdated.

It's not obvious how Parquet C++ can work without linking to libarrow, for example.

Should we just deprecate and remove this option?

Component(s)

C++, Parquet

[pitrou]

@majetideepak You added this option in the first place, can you explain in which situation it might be useful?

[pitrou]

Vercel code search seems smarter than GitHub code search and doesn't return duplicate results from forks. It finds a grand total of 12 occurrences, including our own:
https://grep.app/search?q=PARQUET_MINIMAL_DEPENDENCY

[majetideepak]

@pitrou When parquet-cpp was moved into the arrow-cpp project, the initial goal was to keep parquet-cpp independent of Arrow libs. The move was only to facilitate faster development of Arrow. However, over time, the Arrow libs have become a hard dependency to Parquet
We can remove this CMake option.

[paleolimbot]

Thanks for opening this...it did seem unlikely that it would still work when I was editing the Parquet CMake. I'm happy to give this a try 🙂