Why is lastfm a required dependency?

[Orville Bennett]

Ian Monroe wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Modestas Vainius<modestas at vainius.eu>  wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 2009 m. June 22 d., Monday 23:51:03 Leo Franchi wrote:
>>
>>> Your replies in the email were against the argument for/against
>>> liblastfm being a required dependency, but that is not what I was
>>> responding to. I was replying to your complaint that amarok "attracts
>>> many exotic required dependencies"---just to explain how I don't think
>>> liblastfm is very exotic at all (it just is right right now because
>>> we're early).
>> MySQLe - still exotic, but I can understand why it is required (at least at
>> the moment). ok.
>> QtScriptGenerator - exotic (and really PITA), but I still understand why it is
>> required (and no, it being embedded in Amarok source wasn't any better).
>> Last.fm - exotic and I do not understand why it is required. Even when
>> official last.fm player uses it, it will still be exotic.
>>
>> The more amarok is easy to build, the more users will test it. Even if a
>> distro shipped Amarok beta without last.fm, why would you be angry about it?
>> Do you want testers or not? Or do you want to push last.fm? Sorry for being
>> rude, but it was not the first time I heard that packagers argument and I was
>> ignored numerous times. At least somebody is trying to discuss now.
>
> I'd rather have less testers but also less threads like "why isn't
> Amarok scrobbling anymore" and "what happened to last.fm".
>
> Making it 'optional' implies that someone gets a choice, in reality
> the person presented with the choice is the packager and not the user.
> Even if there's a separate package there's usually no clear way to
> inform users that they are missing out on a feature or a trivial way
> to install it. There's a lot reasons to just have it by default.
>
> So in practice "optional" means non-existent for some users,
Some. Not all or even most. And first and foremost, that probably should 
be solved by dialog with packagers/distros before more drastic measures 
are taken.

> especially for those who use distros which have a "COMPILE->SHIPIT"
> mentality. Just stating that you're not one of these packagers (which
> we appreciate!) doesn't make them go away. :)
Still weak reasoning. Those distros have a choice, as well as those 
users. If they really want to make optional dependencies optional, is it 
worth pissing off the rest of your packagers to fix this?
Seems a bit drastic to me.

> Ian
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