[pkg-discuss] "suggested" dependency

[Norm Jacobs]

Danek Duvall wrote:
> Dan Price wrote:
>
>   
>> Bart and I spoke about this a bit.  I see Laca's question as a symptom of
>> the higher-level "shopping for software" problem, and I think our cycles
>> would be better spent there-- on improving out metadata about which
>> packages represent high-level features, and which packages represent,
>> essentially, implementation details.
>>     
>
> So what's a high-level feature in this particular example, and what's an
> implementation detail -- printing, GUI toolkit, the choices for either one,
> or the intersection between the two?  Imagine there being packages for qt,
> qt/cups, and qt/papi, too.
>
> While I agree that providing interfaces for high-level software (both on
> the publication side and on the end-user side) is important, and probably
> more important than the issue Laca brings up, I don't see particularly how
> it's connected.
>
> What Laca's bringing up, as far as I can tell, is the lack of an interface
> for the intersection of major features.  That is, "printing" might get you
> one or two choices, as might "GUI toolkit" (though that itself isn't likely
> to be an end-user choice; "desktop environment" would be, more likely), but
> the fact that you've chosen some combination might include some packages
> that can only work if both are installed, so it's not appropriate that
> either the printing systems or the toolkits/desktops depend on them.
>
> I think this could be done if we were to allow the installation of a
> package to enable a facet on the system, which in cases like these would
> mean a new (latent) dependency would be exposed, and installed.  Clearly
> this would need some fleshing out, and there may be problems with it Bart
> would see offhand, having thought some more (or differently) about faceting
> than I.
>   
Funny you should mention this.  I have been hoping that facets would 
help solve the comparable problem with things like HPLIP, which includes 
support for SANE, CUPS, LP, ... each of which *may* be installed on your 
system.  This would mean that the installation of one package on your 
system would probably enable a facet of other packages on your system.

       -Norm