On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 09:06:35AM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > Well, if you feel like untangling the dependency nightmare that comes with > modern desktop systems, good luck !
Yes, the dependency chain for "modern" desktop is quite complex. In our packages (at least for GNOME related stuffs) we are trying to find the good balance so that most expected functionnality works out of the box. The drawback of this is that we have to enforce some dependencies sometimes, but it is either that or we end up like Debian and have 15 packages created out of 1. This would end up in a complete nightmare wrt maintainability and users would need to know exactly which -libs, -common... package they need to install to make something work. But do note that unlike most Linux distributions, OpenBSD does _not_ start any daemon installed from packages by default, the user/administrator has to explicitely enable it. So on and on, when you end up with avahi in your dependency chain it is not such a big deal as it will not be started anyway. -- Antoine
