On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 10:11:12 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
The problem is that many (most?) programs won't handle this well. For example, how does mc handle having its perl scripts installed but non-functional?
The "missing extfs.d script" case is trivial. MC simply doesn't offer a virtual filesystem for the file type.
If the script interpreter is missing, it prints a detailed "bad interpreter" error.
In addition, the package managers need some way later to easily install uninstalled soft dependencies, so when mc doesn't work, someone can just say "add what's needed", rather than end-users having to hunt down what is really required to make the external scripts work.
Perhaps similar to a reinstall of "mc", asking the user about what optional deps to add. And hopefully it's not subpackages that contain optional deps with the user running into trouble finding the package which to reinstall/enhance.