I don't think XFCE without icons is " broken ". It's just XFCE without icons.
On the other hand having " recommend packages " to install together
with XFCE seems like " personal preference " to me.
Optional dependencies in my opinion could cause many problems and
solve very few problems.
If there are so many users asking why there are no icons on their XFCE
install that just means the documentation is not effective. Because
information is there
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/XFCE_Setup#Start_your_desktop
I'd rather work on documentation being more visible then on adding
controversial " optional dependencies " to lots of packages in the
APKBUILD itself.
Just my opinion but I think the less stuff in APKBUILD the better for all.
On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 8:42 PM Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev> wrote:
>> Hello,>> > Do you know if the logs are available for> that channel? It may be useful as a future grep source>> It's on http://dev.alpinelinux.org . I'd recommend you to join IRC though since that's the main channel of communication.>> > To keep with Alpine's goal of being minimal, I feel like a config switch> is a little much to start with.>> I don't think that a config switch is non-minimal in any way (as long we don't go overboard with them), but a CLI argument would do for now.>> > Not having optional> dependencies listed has not inhibited usage in Alpine Linux, and at most> required looking at some documentation or code to find the required> dependency for a feature.>> During the time I've been on #alpine-linux I've lost track of the count of users asking why XFCE looks broken by default (no icons and I think no theme even) because we don't add icons by default for the XFCE meta package (since you could install a different icon package) and can't make it recommended since we don't have that feature.>> > To build off my initial idea, it may be nice to have optional> dependencies listed with apk info , and then perhaps just a flag for> apk add as a convenience.>> The problem with that is that we sometimes (have to?) deliver software (somewhat) broken by default (see XFCE) because we don't have something like a "recommended" dependency list. Minimalism is important for Alpine, but I feel like recommended dependencies could still fit in this if the maintainers are careful not to bloat that list.>> Regards,>> Rasmus
Hello,
> I don't think XFCE without icons is " broken ". It's just XFCE without icons.
It does look very broken when you just see the "missing image" icons to me, or at least not fully functional.
> On the other hand having " recommend packages " to install together
with XFCE seems like " personal preference " to me.
It's not personal preference, it's sane defaults (e.g. what upstream tells us).
> If there are so many users asking why there are no icons on their XFCE
install that just means the documentation is not effective. Because
information is there
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/XFCE_Setup#Start_your_desktop
I'd rather work on documentation being more visible then on adding
controversial " optional dependencies " to lots of packages in the
APKBUILD itself.
We just had another person asking on #alpine-linux :)
I don't feel like the docs aren't effective, it's just that people don't always consult the docs for something as simple as doing `apk add` for their desktop. You could argue that they _should_ do that which is fair I suppose, but if you go through the #alpine-linux logs you'll notice that that just doesn't happen in practice :/
> Just my opinion but I think the less stuff in APKBUILD the better for all.
Fair enough, I like how minimal they are too because they're easy to understand like that but recommendation/optional deps wouldn't increase complexity much IMHO.
Regards,
Rasmus
On Tue, 20 Aug 2019 22:05:46 -0300
Alba Pompeo <albapompeo@gmail.com> wrote:
> Optional dependencies in my opinion could cause many problems and> solve very few problems.
I agree with this. I believe it would create more problems than it
solves. Same with "recommends".
-nc