Re: Dependency Champion

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I think our problem here is that the human mind has in it the concept
of "soft dependencies." That is, "This program can use that feature if
it's installed, or else carry on just fine without it." So removing a
feature shouldn't force removal of a program that could work without
the feature.

But that means that every program must be smart about what it can and
can't do at run time. Being myself a programmer, I understand that it
is a lot of work to implement this, especially for large programs that
could potentially have many optional functions. So I can't really
fault programmers for taking the lazy path and saying, "My program
*can* do printing, so you must have CUPS installed to install my
program, whether you intend to ever print or not."

It would be ideal if this were not the case, but I don't see a lot of
programmers willing to put in the extra effort. In the meantime, we're
stuck with, "I can't remove wireless-tools (from my machine with no
wireless hardware whatsoever) unless I can live without
system-config-users." This is where average users get confused and
frustrated, because they understandably don't see any connection at
all.

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