nwg-shell hard & optional dependencies

[Antiz96]

Hey 👋

Someone opened a ticket on the Arch side being confused about nwg-shell hard & optional dependencies (e.g. why is foot a hard dependency and not an optional one as "suggested terminal emulator", like thunar is for file manager).

From what I understood, sway is actually required (despite nwg-shell working with other wayland compositor, such as hyprland). But I'd like your confirmation for the rest.

For "third-parties" dependencies (meaning outside of the nwg-* ones), could you confirm me which ones are actually not hardly required and could eventually be "demoted" to optional dependencies, e.g. as suggested choices (if there are)?

Thanks in advance 🙏

[nwg-piotr]

Hello,

The shell has been developed for sway, and optionally works with Hyprland. Other compositors are not supported (except for derivatives like swayfx, and - they say - sway-compatible like miracle). Installing nwg-shell components w/o sway makes no sense, so this must remain a hard dependency.

If it comes to foot, it's used by default by launchers. Use of other terminal emulators is possible with the -term <string>, but nwg-shell-config does not support this flag.

[edit]

• it seems ttf-dejavu is unnecessary, as it's a part of ttf-font required by sway
• python-dasbus is required by nwg-panel, so may be removed here
• python-geopy is required by nwg-shell-config
• python-yaml is optional for azote and used nowhere else, if I remember well

Actually, the meta-package purpose is to install a ready-for-use product. If someone wants it to consist of different components, let them feel free to give up on the nwg-shell-package and install stuff one by one.

[Antiz96]

Alright, thanks for the confirmation! I'll close the ticket on the Arch side.

[Antiz96]

Replying to the above part of the EDIT, which I only saw right now:

it seems ttf-dejavu is unnecessary, as it's a part of ttf-font required by sway
python-dasbus is required by nwg-panel, so may be removed here
python-geopy is required by nwg-shell-config
python-yaml is optional for azote and used nowhere else, if I remember well

Alright, thanks.

Actually, the meta-package purpose is to install a ready-for-use product. If someone wants it to consist of different components, let them feel free to give up on the nwg-shell-package and install stuff one by one.

Yeah I agree, makes sense. I'll close the ticket with that ;)

[Antiz96]

I closed the Arch ticket and removed dependencies already pulled by other nwg packages.

Feel free to close this discussion :)