Symphony.

One of the things that’s a little bit “off” with extension development/use at present is dependencies. I’ve noticed that a lot of extensions (especially in the text formatter category) depend on other extensions to work, and get really rather huffy if the other extension is not there.

It’d be great if there were a supported way of defining that an extension is dependent on another, and safely disabling it while showing the user why if the parent extension is not present.

Yeah - that would be a great addition to the extension system…

Maybe auto-enabling of depended upon extensions too ;)

I would hope that this wouldn’t happen without asking/notifying the user first - I wouldn’t want something turned on without my knowledge (especially given that a lot of extensions make modifications to the database structure/content when they’re activated).

Is this a consideration for S3 perhaps?

Noted. We can probably look at adding something like:

'depends' => array(
    'rest_api',
    'dashboard'
),

in the increasingly beefed-up about() function.

I’d like to put in my plug for extensions (and their versions) having URIs, and using the URIs for the dependency tracking. This has a lot of potential for automatic dependency resolution, as well as accurately referencing required extensions in some type of future ensemble definition document.

Was this ever implemented? Sorry to bump this up, but being able to establish dependencies would come in handy. To expand on czheng's last comment, would be cool to specify a minimum version as well:

'depends' => array(
    'herlp' => '1.2.4',
    'derp'  => '3.2.4'
)

The discussion continued in this thread: http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/34727/4/