"Dr. Thomas Orgis" <thomas.orgis%uni-hamburg.de@localhost> writes: > A question I have is how much such a big package actually should bother > with making smaller dependencies optional. The math stuff for certain > solvers seems rather to the core, while the Qt GUI is actually optional > at runtime (you need to start `octave --gui` to get the graphical mode, > working in the terminal is possible including plotting via gnuplot in > separate windows). > > At least qrupdate seems to be an unproblematic dep to me. Opinions on > just adding it as hard dep? Any other problem with the not-too-small > attached patch? With dependencies that can be optional, I think about three aspects of them compared to how the package would be without them: - how long does it take to build the extra deps - how big are the extra deps - how likely is it that hte extra deps will fail to build (The first doesn't apply to binary pakage users, but I still consider it as I view building from pkgsrc as normal.) Those are weighted by how many people, if they understood the issues (which most of them don't understand as well as the maintainer), would get how much benefit from inclusion, compared to how much pain the people that don't need/want it would get. Having the build fail is bad, and 2x the size is somewhat annoying, but not having what you need is really bad. So generally if even 10% woudl think a feature is important, and including it doesn't cause huge amounts of time/space and relatively little risk of non-building, I tend to include. From that point of view, adding qt is a really big deal -- but perhaps octave in gui mode is important to most -- and lots of other things are then not a big deal in comparison. Once qt is included, it's hard to object to other things on the basis of space.
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