Overview

Artifact ID: fd8ff09ebad1fdf5f2782cc7480a041c1ad2e738c2cb2f58cbc3707ec4341ebf
Page Name:depends
Date: 2018-07-04 13:27:27
Original User: mario
Mimetype:text/x-markdown
Parent: 4ff727a3adde1f4d9068678e1c4541626ab425a9d29b49c5bdb2f62a50f762da (diff)
Next c14a4b47029651663180bf1ffd99e3d8eb4faf19bcdc06c4c1fe13efe3cbb6ee
Content

# depends:

Lists other plugins or language/system libraries which the current plugin requires:

# depends: corefuncs, json_io, bin:bash

Typically it just lists other plugin basenames. To indicate which must be available/active alongside.

  • It's a list of local URNs.

  • The recommended field name is "depends" and not "require" - for compatibility with the Debian packaging spec, and because it sounds less stringent.

  • Not every application would want to enforce this strictly. Because dynamic languages can soft-detect dependencies usually.

  • Within a plugin management UI, the depends: list could be used for installation warnings.

System/language dependencies

While a TYPE:name entry can reference other scopes (instead of application-local plugins)

bin:imagemagick for binaries
python:lxml for language modules
sys:amd64 for the architecture.
deb:anacron as hint for the system package manager.
api:archnemesis see api ]

This is quite informal still. There's also less practical value to implement theese complex dependency lookups, or these exact ones. This is just the advised syntax.

Versioned dependencies

Additionally the plugin names can be suffixed with a version comparison:

# depends: core (>= 2.0.0)

Which obviously does require the plugin manager to be somewhat more involved. You'll often get away just implementing >= check of course. Most other version expression gimmicks are usually overkill for simple applicatiion-level features.

Related fields

Depending on complexity other fields might be used alongside:

  • # provides:
  • # conflicts:
  • # suggests: