Managing dependencies

[Steven Stewart-Gallus]

Hello.

I'm just some random guy but anyways.

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.

As a programmer, I don't think C is that bad a language but I also
think that not everything has to be in C and as much as I personally
detest and hate Perl POSIX shell scripting is much worse.

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.  First off, helper programs aren't very good at
error handling.  Helper programs just write errors to standard error
and it isn't possible to handle these errors well and maybe retry with
a different tactic.  Secondly, helper programs are kind of wasteful in
that they spawn off a whole process.  Maybe I'm just over thinking and
over complicating the issue though.  After all, these are just little
helper utilities.  But still, having separate binaries for backends
isn't the only form of genericity.

Thank you,
Steven Stewart-Gallus