Comment 57 for bug 148454

@IronStorm
>everything on the desktop
>depends on it for something

<off-topic rant>

Yet another example of rampant dependency inflation. I've complained
about this before in a variety of contexts. Somehow, the entire open
source developer community needs to get a handle on it. It's a big
problem for IYCC, and I suspect other OEMs, when trying to tailor a
machine for a particular use case or market.

The Debian Policy Manual has a a very good statement on how to
categorize dependencies.
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html
Unfortunately, the policy seems not to be enforced nearly enough.

In particular, the entire community should make greater use of
Suggests, Enhances, and Recommends dependencies, of virtual packages
that "Provide" packages, and of meta-packages that are similarly
careful about dependency relationships.

Dependency inflation isn't restricted to Ubuntu. Best I can tell, all
the distros are guilty of it, including RedHat. :-) We're working on
weeding it out of the IYCC Distribution, but it's not a trivial task
because of the pervasiveness of the problem.

I'm not sure how to create a process that would herd the cats, but
it's what's needed. Perhaps each distro should have a Dependency Czar
to review dependencies and crackdown on ever-expanding dependencies.

</off-topic rant>

Happy Trails,

Loye Young
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://www.iycc.net