On 2013-09-11, Bill Nottingham notting@redhat.com wrote:
The problem with soft dependencies has always been the semantics and the workflow, not the implementation. Even as you describe here with defined semantics, that makes assumptions about the workflow, namely that to make use of them:
- the installers are interactive in ways that most of our frontends aren't
False. You can decide soft dependencies on preconfigured base. See Gentoo portage tool. It's hell of soft dependencies and it's not interactive.
- that we're designing for the case where the person handling software installation is interested in this level of platform micromanagement
Again you can leave the decision to a default, if you worry a user gets confused.
-- Petr