On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:37:14 -0500 Larry Stotler larrystotler@gmail.com wrote:
One of my biggest peeves about distros/linux over the years has been the ridiculous dependencies(some of which come from the programs). WHY do I have to install avahi to play KDE3 games in openSUSE 11.0?
Non-rhetorically? Presumably because openSUSE has chosen to treat an optional dependency of kdelibs as mandatory--the chain is kdelibs-3.5.10 -> kdnssd-avahi -> avahi. Most binary distros seem to compile in everything they can, presumably on the basis that someone might need it someday, and when they do, it had better be there. It's a valid approach, but not one I like, which is one of the reasons I'm still with Gentoo--it's good at treating optional dependencies as genuinely optional.