[Libreoffice] Extension dependencies

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 11/04/2011 01:33 PM, Eike Rathke wrote:
> On Friday, 2011-11-04 13:02:02 +0100, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
>>> I'd tend to give the fine-grained dependencies a try.
>>>
>> That won't work in practice, unless those can be
>> (semi-)automatically generated. Experience shows that all
>> programmers are lazy, and seldomly go extra miles.
>
> Seconded, but some do, if it's achievable without a hyper-duper
> incomprehensible framework.. Would it be possible to have both, a simple
> version dependency, and if fine grained dependencies are present use
> those as well?

Not sure if that's not starting to become overengineered, then.  The 
past has shown that most extension writers (even including core 
developers from inside HH that would have benefited from short and 
direct communication channels) are rather happy with "quick and dirty" 
dependencies (in some cases, it even looks like they are simply copied 
over from some other extension blueprint), so---if both a coarse grained 
and fine grained dependencies were available---would probably only 
bother to use the coarse grained, anyway.

Its true that this past experience looks counter to my enthusiasm "to 
give the fine-grained dependencies a try"---maybe I was too enthusiastic 
indeed.  Its also true that some mechanism to mechanically compute 
fine-grained dependencies for a given extension would be helpful, but 
I'm not sure the work is worth it.  (But volunteers are surely welcome!)

The good thing about those dependencies is that we could in principle 
wait until some extension developer expresses demand for one, either 
fine or coarse grained, and only then implement it.  Again in practice, 
however, that's not how it has turned out to work.  Extension developers 
make use of the dependencies they find available and rarely bother to 
ask for additional ones.  (And I don't blame them; this is surely 
tedious stuff where everybody is happy taking the easy way out.)

So, I think I will just introduce a new LibreOffice-minimal-version 
dependency after all.

Stephan