Packages like ffmpeg-full or imagemagick-full requires a provides setting in the formular

[tehabe]

The idea of ffmpeg-full or imagemagick-full might be a good one but it is incomplete. Because if a package like unpaper requires ffmpeg, ffmpeg-full won't help to fullfill this requirement. So it should be possible to use ffmpeg-full or imagemagick-full as full replacement for ffmpeg or imagemagick.

And adding a provides: into the formular would make this easier.

[p-linnane]

This is intentional. *-full formulae are separate optional variants, not drop-in replacements for the default formula. Formulae in Homebrew/core must depend on the default formula, and our audits explicitly reject dependencies on *-full variants.

[tehabe]

That is why I think *-full should act like the default formula and be a drop in replacement for those. Because, currently the *-full are huge hassle to deal with, if you need them e.g. the default version of imagemagick doesn't include support for JPEG XL.

That is why my idea is a provides and maybe even a conflicts setting in the formulae.

[SMillerDev]

And there are a lot of people who disagree with you on that. Please read the discussions here and the pull requests around their creation.

[tehabe]

All I can find is, how the current version breaks the user experience. Be it missing codecs or libraries or breaks with other applications, like mpv. I can understand the reason to make separate formulae but the way it was done is very confusing.

And I mean it is not like the idea I presented is new or unique.

And many issues described in the discussions and PR's would have been solvable with something like this in the formula:

acts_like "${FORMULA}"
conflicts_with "${FORMULA}"

acts_like seems to fit better with way formulae are written.

[p-linnane]

As noted above, this behavior is intentional. Homebrew is not adding provides/acts_like semantics for *-full formulae.

[tehabe]

Where the advantage of the current approach, I can't find any mentioned in the discussions or PR's. It is just very annoying to have to install ffmpeg or imagemagick two times.

[p-linnane]

That is the advantage: both formulae had grown unreasonably large as optional features and dependencies accumulated. The standard variants keep dependencies bounded, and the *-full variants are opt-in. Installing both is the intentional trade-off, and we’re not revisiting that design here.

[tehabe]

I understand the reasons for the seperation of *-full from the regular packages. What I don't understand why *-full packages are not drop-in replacements but keg-only packages with a bunch of caveats how to use them. This design decision just doesn't make sense to me.

I will close this discussion, it seems debating this makes even less sense.