[drupal-devel] forum.module dependent on comment.module

[Mark]

Dries Buytaert wrote:

> Negyesi Karoly wrote:
>
>> The original problem was that casual drupal admin switches on forum 
>> but no comments.
>
> The point?  For us it's obvious that you have to enable the comment 
> module to use forums, but for people that are not familiar with Drupal 
> it is not.  Those people assume that the forum module is self-contained.

Pardon me if I'm coming in late to this discussion, but...

I know that many of the modules that I write depend on other modules to 
be installed and enabled.  Some of them may optionally take advantage of 
other modules if they happen to be installed.  What about having some 
hook for specifying required and optional modules that compliment a 
given module?  The dependencies could be used by an automated installer 
as well.

For instance, filestore2.module could have some means (outside of the 
README.txt, of course) of specifying that fscache.module must be 
installed in order for it to work.  The admin/modules page could display 
a warning when a required module was not enabled.  Optional modules that 
aren't enabled could be suggested at this time as well.

I could see this as a hook_dependencies that looked like:

function filestore2_dependencies() {
  return array('required'=>array('fscache'), 
'optional'=>array('taxonomy','comments'));
}

This would make it very obvious what references a module had, assuming 
the hook was current.

Ideas?

-Mark