Auto-adding optional depends

[Richard Pyne]

Auke,

Sorry, I must have missed the original reply.

The thing that attracted me most to Lunar when I first started 
using it (I think I have a copy of version 1.1 somewhere) was 
the phylosophy of "choice" in that it was a bare bones system 
with nothing extra beyond what was necessary to have a barely 
operational system installed unless you specifically installed 
it.

I can't diagree that the auto-depends stuff might be handy for 
some and in some cases makes modules easier to write, it goes 
against the very heart of this phylosophy. Just like I noticed 
that with 1.6 Linux-PAM is now in the default install, another 
example of where Lunar is moving away from the guiding 
principles that made it my distribution of choice.

I just took a look at the latest version of the postfix module 
(which is what I was trying to lin when I came across this auto-
depends problem) and it has been changed such that all of the 
optional depedencies are through "if  module_installed" tests in 
BUILD instead of actually using DEPENDS or CONFIGURE to actually 
set the options. As I have time, I'll work on this and other 
modules I need as time permits.

I have come across several cases of modules that have things 
listed as required dependencies that are not truly required. The 
applications will build and work just fine without them, but the 
module submitter/maintainer has for unknown reasons made them 
required.

While I greatly appreciate the work of those who submit and 
maintain modules, I would urge all to give serious thought about 
what dependencies are required and optional. I wish I had more 
time to spend building and maintaining modules for lunar.

--Richard

On 27 Apr 2006 at 16:34, Auke Kok wrote:

> 
> 
> On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:53:30 +0200, Moritz Heiber <moe at lunar-linux.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 09:06:38 -0600
> > "Richard Pyne" <rpyne at kinfolk.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Since I never got a response, I'll ask again. How can I turn off
> >> the Auto adding of optional dependencies?????
> >>
> >> This is a serious problem, there are cases where you may want to
> >> remove something that has a dependency in an orderly manner by
> >> rebuilding the application without using the dependency before
> >> removing the module that is a dependency.
> > 
> > Richard,
> > 
> > the problem currently is that if optional dependencies do not carry a
> > modifier like ..
> > 
> > optional_depends "module" "--enable-somthing"
> > 			  "--disable-something"
> > 			  "text"
> > 
> > because there actually are no modifiers or a module picks them up
> > automatically .. like
> > 
> > optional_depends "module" "" "" "text"
> > 
> > then the optional depedencies gets auto-added if installed. You may
> > consider that a bug actually .. I, for one, find it sort of handy
> > because I get asked less questions. Please file a bugreport if you
> > don't see it that way.
> 
> it's not a bug - if the --disable-modifier is missing from the module then there is *no way* that you can disable it since the module will automatically pick it up. This is the only case where you are *not* asked.
> 
> if you are bothered by this behaviour then you should submit a patch or bug against that specific modules' DEPENDS file.
> 
> running `lunar fixdepends` after removing a module should also remove any optional dependency on that module and set things right for the next occasion where you compile it. Of course, since in that case the optional_depends question makes sense (module is not installed, neither did you answer the optional_depends question before with 'no) you are asked again, but now the default answer is 'no'.
> 
> after that you are no longer asked until you reconfigure dependencies one way or another.
> 
> Auke
> 
> 
> 
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