Hard vs. soft deps (Was Re: Proposing dependencies for gnome-games)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 22:27 +0100, Andreas Røsdal wrote:
> > Why is it necessary for gnome-games configure to fail if GGZ is not
> > found?   If configure doesn't find GGZ, why not just disable building
> > whatever games have hard dependencies on GGZ?  Or do all the games now
> > depend on GGZ?
> 
> GGZ has already been accepted as a external dependency. See:
> http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentyone/ExternalDependencies

Hardly a very constructive response. My take is that the list is not
accurate; we really should make a distinction between hard and soft
deps. Software in the GNOME desktop and platform releases should be able
to build without having the soft deps available; yet it's fine for them
to fail if it's missing a hard dep.

Ideally, in the place where we enumerate the soft deps, an explanation
of what value/features the soft dep adds is listed.

For example, hal is AFAIK not a hard dep. On the other hand things like
libXrender, a compliant C compiler, a POSIX-compliant libc etc. probably
is. Notably these are missing from the list; maybe just because it's
evident they are hard deps. Which is fine. No reason to state the
perfectly obvious.

Whether GGZ should be a hard or a soft dep, I don't know. But I know we
need to make a distinction. Thoughts?

Also, who is maintaining the dep list? I've proposed PolicyKit and
PolicyKit-gnome as soft deps but received no response from the
maintainers of that list. OTOH, lots of projects seem to want to use
PolicyKit at least as a soft dep. Who am I supposed to track down? The
release team? Thanks.

     David