Do I need avahi?

[Tethys]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:

> You suggest the scenario where just package A would be installed, and if
> I happen to need some functionality of A (as opposed to some more
> elementary functionality of A which would be good enough for you), I
> would need to install B manually. But the features of B that are used
> by A might also work in B only if some other package C is installed, so
> I would need to install that manually as well. And so on...
>
> This chain of "optional" dependencies could continue indefinitely, and
> is called "Dependency Hell". It's a very descriptive name, and soft
> dependencies are not supported precisely to avoid those situations.

Nope. Dependency hell is what we currently have and is IMHO the single
biggest problem facing Fedora. I've filed countless bugs about excessive
dependencies, and a few have been fixed. But there needs to be a systematic
approach to this in the form of a policy saying "only provide the absolute
minimum hard dependencies for a package". Of course, this would benefit
hugely from soft dependencies in rpm, which others have claimed don't
yet exist. I don't know why you think you'd need to install dependencies
manually in such a scenario. Just add a flag to yum to say:

	yum --optional-deps install foo

Hell, make it the default for all I care (which would give you the
current behaviour), so long as those of us that don't want the bloat
can do something like:

	yum --no-optional-deps install foo

Fine grained behaviour like:

	yum --optional-deps=avahi,cups install foo

would be nice, but not essential.

> How can a machine know whether or not you are going to need some
> functionality? You might not be the only user on the system, and other
> users might need some features that you don't.

The machine doesn't know. I, however, do know. I'd like to be able to
tell the machine what I know and how I want it to behave.

Tet