To Require yelp or not to require yelp

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sunday 10 June 2007, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> >
> > If an application specifically needs yelp (spelled out in its code or
> > config) it ought to require yelp or give an error dialog if yelp is
> > missing. If, on the contrary, it only uses yelp via some GNOME component,
> > there also ought to be an error dialog if yelp is missing.

+1

> You'd still need the gnome libraries which should pull in the right stuff.

yelp comes with a dependency chain.  In the case of dia, adding a dependency 
on yelp (whether directly or indirectly if the dep is in some gnome lib 
packages), that right stuff would result in the need to additionally install 
yelp, desktop-file-utils, docbook-dtds, fedora-bookmarks, firefox, 
gnome-doc-utils, libXt, libbeagle, nspr, nss, openjade, opensp, scrollkeeper, 
sgml-common, and xml-common.

In some cases the number of additional dependencies is probably smaller and in 
some others even larger.  Either way, various GNOME things already suffer 
from dependency bloat, please let's try to work towards reducing, not adding 
to it.  I think having yelp installed by default (if GNOME is selected) and 
fixing apps to output sensible error dialogs if it's missing, and not adding 
the dependencies in packages [0] would be an ok solution for this case.

[0] Requires(hint)/Suggests support in depsolvers could also help here.