Question: depending on multiple sound server libraries

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 11:41:09 (CET), Johannes Weißl wrote:

> Hello list!
>
> I have a question about dependency of packages on multiple sound server
> libraries. The cmus [1] audio player has multiple output plugins, like
> roar, alsa, pulse, ao, etc. The package used to depend on all those
> libraries, but then users complained [2] because libroar1 recommends the
> roaraudio server. Although this is fixed now (libroar1 only suggests
> roaraudio), I wonder what would be the best solution for this problem:
>
> a) make cmus-plugin-* packages for all plugins which require additional
>    dependencies (like in sox)
> b) only make cmus-plugin-* packages for "rarely" used plugins
>    (e.g. roar) and depend on e.g. libpulse0
> c) depend on (almost) all dependencies
>
> I know normally a) would be the way to go, but since the player is
> really small I don't know if it's worth to split it into 7+ packages...
> What do you think?

If cmus handles missing libraries gracefully, you could do what xine did
in the past, namely putting the dependencies in the 'Recommends' or even
'Suggests' field instead of 'Depends'.

Xine abandoned that idea in the end, however. While from the maintenance
side, it was quite maintainable (at least IMO), it wasn't really that
well accepted by the users AFAIR, so xine now does it similar to vlc and
packs its modules in a rather artificially selected set of packages
which turned out to become very hard to get right.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4