I just saw on a friend's system, that opening files via ftp doesn't work with emacs if net-ftp/ftp isn't installed. However there seems to be neither a dependency nor USE-Flag (ftp should be considered in this case probably) for this.
usata, what's your thoughts on these kinds of dependencies? Emacs does rely on a lot of external programs for various functions, but I am not so sure we should attempt to enumerate them in RDEPEND. These kinds of dependencies can't be thought of as "hard" dependencies which are required for it to operate at runtime. If we take the road of adding ftp as a runtime dependency, then we should also consider diff, patch, rcs, sccs, cvs, arch, man, gdb and in emacs-cvs's case, tramp dependencies such as ssh, sudo, su, rsh, telnet. We'd also need some kind of print system too, so virtual/lpr would need to be added. Gnus probably won't work in certain cases without gnutls or openssl. I'm sure there's many others... Certainly I think it is not feasible to have a USE flag for each. Perhaps in wernfried's case we should check to see if a clear error message is given to the effect that /usr/bin/ftp simply doesn't exist. If there is no clear error message, perhaps we can improve the situation by creating a patch to send upstream?
mkennedy, basically I agree with you. If there is a global USE flag we can use it to add requied package to RDEPEND, but if there isn't suitable global USE flag, I don't think we need to add one, especially when the package is required only at runtime. (If it is required at build time, we might consider adding local USE flag to pull in the package to get elc files correctly)
matthew: The error message is "Searching for program: no such file or directory, ftp", clear enough imho.
(Sorry for the delay) I think the error message is clear enough, too. I don't think we need USE flag for this at this stage. Anyways, thanks for the bug report.
