Managing dependencies

[Jerome Leclanche]

xdg-utils does not depend on perl; all the tools are in shell. You
should talk to your distro.
J. Leclanche


2015-01-16 22:11 GMT+01:00 Steven Stewart-Gallus
<sstewartgallus00 at mylangara.bc.ca>:
> 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
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