[Tickets #6559] Re: Application should fail gracefully if prerequisites not installed

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Ticket URL: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/6559
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 Ticket             | 6559
 Updated By         | Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>
 Summary            | Application should fail gracefully if prerequisites
not installed
 Queue              | Horde Framework Packages
 Version            | HEAD
 Type               | Bug
-State              | Unconfirmed
+State              | Not A Bug
 Priority           | 1. Low
 Milestone          |
 Patch              |
 Owners             |
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Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org> (2008-04-09 15:41) wrote:

First of all, this is a pretty nice patch. Thank you for submitting it.

However, I'm going to stand by my (and Jan and Michael's) stance that this
isn't a bug. There is a philosophical difference in that I don't think it's
problematic that a user can cause a misconfigured or improperly installed
application to emit a fatal error. It's perhaps not ideal, but it's not
horrible. Fatal errors from a properly installed and configured app are
different of course.

My main reason for rejecting this, though, is that:

a. DIMP and MIMP are the only Horde applications that require any other
Horde application in this way, and the next version will fold them both in
to IMP, eliminating this situation.

b. PEAR already provides an extensive dependency mechanism, and it is our
goal to make Horde applications PEAR-installable in the future.

Given these two things - this is only true for two applications, and we'll
be moving to an already-existing, more complete system in the future - I
don't think it makes sense to introduce a separate dependency mechanism
into Horde.