On 12/27/06, Leo <sdl.web at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Robert Dodier (2006-12-27 12:31 -0700) said:
> > On 12/27/06, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> Attached is the patch to enable use of xdg-utils in place of
> >> hard-coded calls to web browses, ps/pdf apps.
> >
> > I'm pretty strongly opposed to merging this patch into Maxima cvs.
> > It makes Maxima dependent on xdg-utils, which, I am pretty sure, is
> > less widely installed than ghostview (whatever it is called).
> As I understand it, xdg-utils is there to select the program, be it
> ghostview, gv, evince or kpdf i.e. it is a more general
> approach. Besides, it is a bunch of sh scripts that means it can be
> installed in most systems.
It is not the size of xdg-utils that matters here but its presence or absence.
For every new package dependency, the number of systems for
which Maxima can be successfully installed is decreased.
Xdg-utils seems like a minor convenience, so on the balance it
seems like a pretty bad move to make Maxima depend on it.
On some systems (Gentoo, maybe others) new dependencies may be
less of a problem. I'll let the maintainers for other systems sort it out.
In general, however, we cannot assume that new dependencies are
resolved automatically.
For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier