Danek Duvall wrote:
Dan Price wrote:
Bart and I spoke about this a bit. I see Laca's question as a symptom of
the higher-level "shopping for software" problem, and I think our cycles
would be better spent there-- on improving out metadata about which
packages represent high-level features, and which packages represent,
essentially, implementation details.
So what's a high-level feature in this particular example, and what's an
implementation detail -- printing, GUI toolkit, the choices for either one,
or the intersection between the two? Imagine there being packages for qt,
qt/cups, and qt/papi, too.
While I agree that providing interfaces for high-level software (both on
the publication side and on the end-user side) is important, and probably
more important than the issue Laca brings up, I don't see particularly how
it's connected.
What Laca's bringing up, as far as I can tell, is the lack of an interface
for the intersection of major features. That is, "printing" might get you
one or two choices, as might "GUI toolkit" (though that itself isn't likely
to be an end-user choice; "desktop environment" would be, more likely), but
the fact that you've chosen some combination might include some packages
that can only work if both are installed, so it's not appropriate that
either the printing systems or the toolkits/desktops depend on them.
I think this could be done if we were to allow the installation of a
package to enable a facet on the system, which in cases like these would
mean a new (latent) dependency would be exposed, and installed. Clearly
this would need some fleshing out, and there may be problems with it Bart
would see offhand, having thought some more (or differently) about faceting
than I.
Funny you should mention this. I have been hoping that facets would
help solve the comparable problem with things like HPLIP, which includes
support for SANE, CUPS, LP, ... each of which *may* be installed on your
system. This would mean that the installation of one package on your
system would probably enable a facet of other packages on your system.
-Norm
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