Managing dependencies

[Reuben Thomas]

On 16 January 2015 at 21:11, Steven Stewart-Gallus <
sstewartgallus00 at mylangara.bc.ca> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> I'm just some random guy but anyways.
>

​Thanks for commenting!​


> As a user and administrator, I dislike excess dependencies on my
> system such as Perl but can always just remove the xdg-utils package
> if I really want to, so having xdg-utils depend on Perl isn't that bad
> a thing.
>

​How many systems don't have Perl? My guess is that unless they're
appliances or virtual machines tailored for a particular application, not
many, but maybe I'm wrong?

About the pluggable backends thing.  I think that would lead to a much
> cleaner design and also potentially a much lighter system (one could
> not have installed an xdg-utils-gnome package, an xdg-utils-kde
> package, etc..).  However, I also somewhat think that this sort of
> genericity maybe should be done via interfaces like DBus because the
> traditional Unix approach of a program spawning off a helper program
> is really clunky.


​Relying on DBus quickly gets you into dependency hell. Further…​


> First off, helper programs aren't very good at
> error handling.


​They can return an error code, like any program. Or as you say, they can
write to stderr (or stdout). Either way, the caller can examine the result
and take appropriate action; what's the problem?​

Secondly, helper programs are kind of wasteful in
> that they spawn off a whole process.


​This simply isn't a problem: the current shell scripts spawn so many
processes that a few more won't make a difference. Rewriting in Perl would
vastly reduce the number of forks, but I really don't think it's a
priority: the current implementations have issues, but I've never seen
anyone complain about their performance.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org
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