[arch-general] xterm and xorg-apps

[Andrew Przepioski]

On 2/18/09, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:05:49AM -0800, Andrew Przepioski wrote:
>> How come xorg-apps is a dependency for xterm? Been a lil' curious for
>> awhile and have tried figuring it out, but found nothing so I figured
>> I would ask here.
>
> As of xterm 230 part of the xterm package is koi8rxterm from Debian
> which has xorg-apps as a dependency (at least xmessage).
>
> I would also say, since i already answered your question, that personally
> i am deeplu annoyed with the why is this a dependency for that mentality
> going on especially in the forums, and especially without reseaching the
> reasons first. That is not directed to Andrew. Its quite general. Guess
> what, programs have features. Features is what people want. Features
> usually have dependencies. If you dont like them, build it your self
> first, then IF you find that something is useless, not just for you,
> report it in the bug tracker.
> If you still dont like what you get, dont use the Arch package, maintain
> your own, its really easy.
>
> --
> Greg
>

I don't think it's so much people not being able to build packages
themselves or just install it without the dependency, I personally do
pacman -Sd xterm since I don't use xorg-apps, I think people are just
curious as to why certain things are included with certain packages by
default. People probably feel more free to ask these kinds of
questions here because Archlinux is about choice and being able to get
exactly what you want without too much hassle (otherwise I could just
do LFS and ensure I get exactly what I want if I spend a couple of
days working on it). To me, when I was googling about xterm trying to
determine why xorg-apps was included, what feature is included with
xterm that makes it need xorg-apps, I couldn't find anything, which
means that it's not a matter of me not wanting a feature, but me not
knowing of a feature. Of course, there are other things like
xorg-server needing hal, and I think everyone is tired of hearing why
hal is included with xorg-server, and I've been like you, answering
these kind of question, but this is a feature that we know of and are
well aware of, and in that situation, I would understand your
annoyance.