Reconsider emacs dependency for brew formula

[indigoviolet]

I have a separate emacs installation and don't want to use brew's installation; I wonder how common that is and whether emacs should be a required dependency in the formula.

[kaushalmodi]

don't want to use brew's installation

I don't have a macOS machine, so I don't use brew personally. I had added that through a user request and PR.

If you don't want to use brew, you can follow these instructions: https://eless.scripter.co/#installation

whether emacs should be a required dependency in the formula.

Well, eless basically is a shell script that calls emacs in batch mode. So it makes sense to have emacs as a dependency.

[indigoviolet]

Thanks for the quick response. My reasoning was that a user (who has discovered and is capable of using eless) can easily brew install emacs themselves if they wanted; it is more of a pain to figure out how not to install that dependency (--ignore-dependencies) or blow away their existing installation. In any case, if you're not the author/owner of the formula, this issue can be closed.

[kaushalmodi]

@raxod502 If you have time, can you address @indigoviolet 's concern here? Should emacs be removed as a dependency from eless' brew recipe?

[raxod502]

No, IMO this is something that should be addressed in the package manager, not in individual packages. The package manager must provide a mechanism for you to say you have installed a package manually, and that it should be considered to satisfy dependencies for that package. For example, if you were to install some other software that depended on Emacs, you would surely want your custom installation to satisfy that requirement as well, right? The solution is not to modify all software everywhere to remove dependencies on any package that might be installed manually; it is for the end user to use Homebrew's feature of setting a package as manually installed---or, if such a feature doesn't exist, submitting a feature request upstream.

[indigoviolet]

I generally agree that Homebrew should provide this (some relevant discussion); I have also already solved this for myself so I don't feel too strongly. But just to play devil's advocate: we haven't indicated perl, bash and texinfo as dependencies, though they technically are: we believe they will usually be present in the context where eless would be installed.

[raxod502]

That's just because they are shipped in the base macOS distribution, no?

[kaushalmodi]

@indigoviolet I've converted this to a discussion as this isn't something that can be fixed in this repo.