Hi, I am trying to understand the reasoning behind Kopete's dependency on xmms. I know the underlying reason is the functioality of some plugin (Now Listening) that allows IM buddies to see what you're currently listening to.
I read the threat on debian-mentors that discussed this issue (http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2003/debian-mentors-200302/msg00206.html) It concludes with a reference to an apparantly well known discussion about [debian] bug #119517. This bug dealt with a similar problem of the pcmcia-cs package that contained a simple X utility. For this utility to work at all, X libraries would have to be installed. I also read the discussion on debian-ctte where this pcmcia-cs matter was dealt with (http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2002/debian-ctte-200204/msg00012.html) It was my impression that the issue was settled in a way that ruled out the possibility of having a package depend on a relatively unrelated package just because of some rather small functionality that would be better served by having its needed dependencies mentioned in Suggested or Recommended. And indeed, the pcmcia-cs package does not depend on xlibs. xlibs is only included among the Suggested packages. ---------- What then was the reason for having Kopete depend on xmms? Wouldn't it be better to reconsider this and follow the example of pcmcia-cs? If I weigh the pros and cons, it seems to me that the negatives of having this dependency are greater than those of not having an out-of-the-box functionality of a single plugin (that is disabled by deafult). I am, predictably, only trying to begin this discussion because I don't use xmms, but I do like to use Kopete (without the aforementioned plugin, of course). Robert
