On 24/05/2015 00:17, Steve Litt wrote:
> http://troubleshooters.com/linux/politics_of_dependencies.htm

Well written, Steve. I liked the article. :)

I would argue that arrogance isn't so much the problem as carelessness.
It's actually a good idea to stand your ground against external pressure
when you know exactly what you are doing and why, and are certain that
your position is what is best for the users. But that last part is very
important, and sometimes developers tend to forget about users.

One important thing developers are often careless about is precisely the
amount of dependencies in a project. On a development machine, it is
easy to always get the newest, shiniest tool, and quickly make a project
work using that tool. But dependencies are a cost, a cost that is mostly
hidden to developers, and also mostly hidden to users with a lot of hard
drive space who just let their distribution manage everything for them -
but that is very visible to users who actually build the software or want
to tinker with it in some way.

As a rule of thumb, developers should always use the smallest possible
amount of dependencies for a project, and clearly separate layers - e.g.
if a project comes with an engine and a GUI, then the engine should come
as a command-line tool in its own package with no dependencies on graphical
stuff, which would be the role of the GUI package. But I'm a dinosaur AND
a fan of minimalism, so I don't expect many people to think like me.

--
Laurent