Overview

Artifact ID: 4e6fd14579f5ee2859be2dcf92f9c933d3bdf3cd1055bfc7b47214b1db15cc54
Page Name:depends
Date: 2018-07-04 13:44:13
Original User: mario
Mimetype:text/x-markdown
Parent: 722c73461a18d117cbe8d1caa6e7907451f041e239d3a34c3c029b1ecadc9500 (diff)
Next 9488f5fbcb4a491dcd23da11af0a90ff27fe66ff791218b1637459d7e81b00ac
Content

# depends:

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

# depends: corefuncs, json_io, bin:bash

Each entry is a plugin basename, and indicates it must be available/active alongside.

  • The recommended field name is "depends" and not "require" - for parity 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.

It's optional, and might be treated as documentation in some implementations.

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 a >= check. Most other version expression gimmicks are likely overkill for simple applicatiion-level features.

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.

Related fields

Depending on complexity other fields might be used alongside:

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