My position is that regardless of how a package is implemented (whether with require, dynamic-require, etc) it should "work" after being installed, so things that are "necessary" should be listed as dependencies.
If a package has additional optional features that make use of other installed packages, then they don't need to be listed even if their absence causes a runtime exception on certain functions. For example, I could imagine a version of the db library that didn't require every particular db connector but would still provide the exports, but just error. (Although in that case, I think it might be nicer for the connector to provide db/sqlite and so on.) Jay On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 11:55 PM, Asumu Takikawa <as...@ccs.neu.edu> wrote: > Hi all, > > Should dynamically required libraries induce a package dependency? > > Take for example the "xrepl-lib" package. It currently depends on five > other packages, but I think two of them can be dropped and `raco setup` > won't complain. > > On the other hand, XREPL may `dynamic-require` the macro stepper (one of > the dependencies that can be dropped). The same is true for DrRacket > (not listed as a dependency), but it doesn't make much sense to make the > XREPL package depend on DrRacket. > > Is there a best practice for these kinds of cases yet? > > Cheers, > Asumu > _________________________ > Racket Developers list: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev -- Jay McCarthy <j...@cs.byu.edu> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93 _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
