14 Feb
2012
14 Feb
'12
9:37 p.m.
On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:37:14 -0500
Larry Stotler <larrystotler(a)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.