On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 15:43 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2015-07-28 15:24, Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
I guess that's the direction you meant to lead to, right?
Yes :-)
I don't have an actual example in mind, but... let me see if I can explain.
In 13.1 you can remove packages, and they remain off. Since 13.2, yast wants to install them back the next time you run it, because they are recommended by something. So the recommendation is either to taboo what the user removes, or to overall disable "install recommended packages for installed packages" or similar wording (13.1 somehow remembers: this feature had problems and was removed in 13.2).
The problem arises when they try to use, from an application, something that was not installed (although recommended), and it is difficult from the application to know what package is needed on package management.
On an ideal world, the application could trigger /then/ the installation of the recommended packages.
It doesn't need to be plugins, but that's one, yes.
Ok, then I think I got your idea right - but it still leads to the
problem that the main program can't possibly know which extensible
features have all ever been coded for this application. So the program
itself can't possibly know what you need to install. I'd seen some
packages hinting at what might be missing (there were even some patches
to make it match the openSUSE package names in some cases) - but that's
a very limited usecase and if I remember correctly, that was on an
interpreted language (python), where it's more common that you miss
some dependencies. Most 'upstreams' expect the program to be completely
installed when built - the splitting off sub-packages is in most cases
not what the software author would expect, but we do it do limit the
space here and there.
so having a software author add features that he never intended (and
not directly works in favor of his application) makes it less probable
that it would happen (for totem it was considered probable enough that
you get a video file it can't play, that's why it was done in first
place)
Dominique
--
Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger