On Tue, 12 May 2020 15:55:58 +0200
Markus Schaaf
It's not really clear to me when to optdepend.
Comments welcome. My idea is to use optdepends for things the user may want, but it's not obvious how to make them work, like a glue-library the application needs to use another facility, e.g. gpgme to use gpg, or ghostscript to produce PDF.
As a *user*, I look at an optdepends'ed package as an otherwise independent package that makes the original package better or more useful. I usually think that the original package will use the optdepends'ed package out of the box, especially if the latter is already installed when I install the former, or automatically if I install the latter later. IMO, the more I have to do to configure the main package to use the optdepends'ed package, the relationship degrades from optdepends to something lesser. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD#optdepends has some good examples. In particular, if I see that a package has an optdepends on CUPS, then I assume that that package detects and uses CUPS all by itself. The package, of course, likely does lots of other things even if it can't print. Just my 2¢. -- “Atoms are not things.” – Werner Heisenberg Dan Sommers, http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan