On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 12:09 -0400, Horst H. von Brand wrote: > This whole "soft dependencies" idea has been discussed to death numerous > times already, and the conclusion has always been that they really don't > solve anything. There is a wide range of very different functionalities > under this idea: Suggestions for additional packages that might be useful > for a tiny minority to packages that should be installed together always > except if you are extremely tight on space, packages that work well > together, packages that form a set with a common UI, ... I can't agree with that. There's cases where they're clearly very useful. One obvious one I maintain for Mandriva is Elisa (which just got renamed to Moovida). If certain other packages are involved, it gains very useful features...but it works perfectly well without them, and some users may not want those features. A soft dependency covers this situation pretty perfectly; by default you get the extra dependencies installed so the features will be available, but if you're someone who needs to optimize disk space or number of installed packages you'll have configured urpmi not to install soft dependencies so you won't get them, and if you didn't do that but you later decide to remove one of the soft deps, you can. I consider this a significant win, the package would be objectively less good without this. Here's the external soft deps in the packages... # visualizations in music playback Suggests: gstreamer0.10-libvisual # iPod support Suggests: python-gpod # For UPnP support Suggests: python-coherence # For the weather report plugin Suggests: python-pymetar # lets moovida be a UPNP server Suggests: python-coherence # DAAP support Suggests: python-daap # Needed for DAAP plugin Suggests: avahi-python # Needed for yes.fm support Suggests: python-simplejson # For LIRC input support Suggests: python-lirc I really think the soft deps are the right way to do things here. Those things aren't hard deps, the app works without them, and there are perfectly valid reasons you might not want them. But on the other hand, it kinda sucks to have no indication of the fact that they provide significant useful features to Moovida in the package metadata. They're certainly not things you'd easily figure out on your own, you'd probably just think Moovida couldn't *do* that stuff. I'm having a hard time seeing how the soft deps aren't performing a really useful function, here. That was just one example. I used soft deps in quite a lot of my MDV packages. They just seemed a good way to handle several situations. mc is another example of an app which works with quite a minimal set of other packages installed, but has a lot more features with more installed. I really think it's nice to have a way to handle this. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
