Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:58:48 +0200
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev>
Cc: albapompeo@gmail.com, me@cosmoborsky.com,
 ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: APKBUILD Optional/Recommended Dependencies
Message-ID: <20190822105848.134628ff@ncopa-desktop.copa.dup.pw>
References: <883dca1a-b7f3-6137-059d-f561ef22c126@cosmoborsky.com>
	<e096850a-8d73-b321-8ac8-24caa4614e3e@cosmoborsky.com>
	<5d5c8583.1c69fb81.9691a.45e5SMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com>
	<CAJDAfTDq725MQ_T3LaS015XVwbDtrTZMmLJRjCEd38rUmJGJJA@mail.gmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On Wed, 21 Aug 2019 18:14:48 +0000
Rasmus Thomsen <oss@cogitri.dev> wrote:

> 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 :/

I wonder if we can solve this without modifying apk-tools. For example,
we could have opinionated installer scripts. For example `setup-xfce`
or `setup-desktop -e xfce` or similar. Which would apk add a working
default which user can tweak afterwards.

> > 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.

The problem is way more complex than it seems. Maybe not in APKBUILDs
but in apk's resolver.

-nc