My opinion is the primary binary for a
On mar., 2016-07-19 at 11:13 +1000, Allan McRae wrote: package should run out of the box. If you really need to reduce dependencies, then a split package should be considered. Comments/opinions? I think we provide a bad user experience when a program refuse to start because a shared library is missing. This sounds like a packaging issue and I agree we should improve the current situation. Keeping the proposed example, the binary which provides the primary functions of virtualbox (understand start/stop/edit VM) is vboxmanage. In fact "virtualbox" is the entry point to the Qt GUI. There is also an SDL GUI (VBoxSDL) and a no-GUI (VBoxHeadless). For a server usage (without screen) of virtualbox, the primary binary runs out the box without the Qt5 deps. Admin that Qt5 GUI is the primary binary/usage, what "run out of the box" means? Only display the GUI interface or the features behind ? When you create a VM (via this primary binary) with hostonly networking, it will not works until you install net-tools (currently a optdepds) and it's not obvious to figure out. So "primary binary" and "run out of the box" not really help to make the choice with no doubt. My current opinion is to only use optional dependencies to provides enhancement to the package which are not creating library dependency issues. Which means wherever the virtualbox binary is shiped, the deps to qt5 should be pulled with. Regards, -- Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer https://seblu.net | Twitter: @seblu42 GPG: 0x2072D77A