Auto-adding optional depends

[Auke Kok]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:50:26 -0600, "Richard Pyne" <rpyne at kinfolk.org> wrote:
> 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.

which I completely agree with!

> 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. 

after reading the rest of your mail I can see you are mixing a few notions - about the optional_depends auto-select code in the core:

This is not the issue! it's just logically impossible for a module to detect that you do NOT want a dependency if the module writer didn't offer any --disable-flags.

however, this could have been prevented by writing proper DEPENDS files... 

> 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.

PAM was already on 1.5.* by default

offering a basic and standard security platform is a sane choice. removing PAM is trivial too, and if you know this already then you are big enough to do so yourself. all the other people who have no clue should definately use PAM, if only to protect against themselves.

we also provide sshd on the ISO, with rootlogons denied. Another case where we provide an extra feature that just makes sense, with more security than default, just because. we still allow you to completely ignore this and install telnet ;^)

> 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.

that's a bug indeed - not a lot of developers have seen 'in_depends' and 'is_depends' yet - I'll patch this myself to fix this.

> 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.

again, that's a module bug if so. Just yesterday I removed hostap-driver from wpa_supplicant as depends completely because of this.
 
> 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.

agreed and if you don't have the time, please file bugreports ;^)

Thanks,

Auke