Re: Raster3D (and gff2aplot too)

["Thijs Kinkhorst" <lists@kinkhorst.com>]

On Fri, April 22, 2005 09:22, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Every single piece of software in your package has to work.  If there
> is something in your package which needs imagemagick or gs-gpl include a
> dependency (why not - these packages will be installed on most machines
> dealing with graphics stuff anyway so it is cheap).  If there are real
> reasons to keep these packages outside of some boxes you have to split the
> "non-core" parts out of your main package into raster3d-extra
> or whatever and make this dependand from the dependencies they need

I tend to disagree here - it can be fine to use Recommends or Suggests if
only a small part of your package doesn't work without them. For example
in the SquirrelMail package we've made ispell and php-pear Recommends resp
Suggests, because if you don't use the spell checker or a database
backend, SquirrelMail runs just fine. We just had to make sure that
SquirrelMail fails gracefully if you attempt to use this functionality
without the packages (it outputs an error suggesting to install the needed
package).


Regards,

Thijs