Re: Install profiles

[Aurélien COUDERC <libre@coucouf.fr>]

Le vendredi 16 juin 2023, 15:29:14 CEST David Kalnischkies a écrit :
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2023 at 07:29:57PM +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:
> > Quoting Julian Andres Klode (2023-06-14 18:00:42)
> > > This allows users to customize their systems and avoid installing recommends
> > > they don't want.
> > 
> > I do not see a reasonable cost/benefit ratio here. There is a surprising amount
> 
> The topic of "conditional dependencies" comes up once in a while, and
> that is basically how this came up as well – as a pipe dream. I was
> somewhat surprised Julian would actually go and post it seriously.
> 
> The things you usually want to express with those are roughly:

[…]

> * if X do also install foo (e.g. install firefox-l10n-de if firefox
>   is installed and user wants german language packs)

A similar example for the skanpage scanning software from KDE : it requires tesseract-ocr-$language to make OCR working for $language.

Currently the only options I can think of are installing all tesserract-ocr-* languages when the user installs skanpage, install tesseract-ocr-$lang alongside task-$lang-desktop, or don’t have OCR available by default (current state) all of which have various issues.

This came up as #1030620 recently.


I’m pretty sure there were more such issues raised in the past for desktop software where optional deps would improve the behaviour for our users, but cannot remember off the top of my head.


Cheers,
--
Aurélien