[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 18:13 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> One would probably want two levels of soft requires - the syntax is
>> implemented in rpm but not sure if they're currently distinguishable
>> outside the spec syntax:
>> Requires(missingok) and Requires(hint) where "missingok" is something
>> you'd want to install by default but removing of the dependency wont
>> break the package, "hint" being .. well, a hint that this might be
>> useful with this software but not installed automatically. Enhances is
>> basically Suggests reversed for situations where Suggests cannot be
>> used
>> because the main package has no knowledge of the enhancing package.
>
> This seems to be spiraling into major complexity and lots of ways for
> developers to get it wrong.  Boo.  I've never been very thrilled with
> the idea of soft deps, and I really haven't seen it done right.

What's so difficult about this:

1) It's hard dependency, without it the package will not run. 
2) It's something that should be installed for "best user experience"
    but the package will run without it. Depsolvers treat it as any old
    hard dependency expect dont whine about it if it's removed. A good
    example of this would be evolution requiring spamassassin - evo will
    work just fine without spamassassin and in many environments the
    spamassassin is completely redundant to have on every workstation.
3) It's something that will bring in additional functionality useful
    for some users. Nothing more than a hint that a depsolver (GUI) might
    list "you might additionally find some of these useful". An example of
    this would be xmms + it's myriad of plugins: xmms-sid isn't something
    most people will care about.

 	- Panu -