Bug 72850

Summary:	Emacs should depend on ftp or have a USE flag for this
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Wernfried Haas (RETIRED) <amne>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Emacs project <emacs>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	minor
Priority:	Low
Version:	2004.3
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Wernfried Haas (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-11-29 13:03:39 UTC

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.

Comment 1 Matthew Kennedy (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-12-01 08:35:01 UTC

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?

Comment 2 Mamoru KOMACHI (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-12-02 03:13:26 UTC

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)

Comment 3 Wernfried Haas (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-12-02 04:06:26 UTC

matthew: The error message is "Searching for program: no such file or directory, ftp", clear enough imho.

Comment 4 Mamoru KOMACHI (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2005-05-03 11:03:08 UTC

(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.