Is lynx optional?

[jgarte]

Would you consider lynx to be optional when providing the bower package in a GNU/Linux distribution?

As for Lynx specifically, whether you’d leave it as is (in which case
it’s found if and only if it’s in $PATH), or whether you’d use
‘substitute*’ depends on whether it’s an optional dependency or not. If
Bower can gracefully handle lack of Lynx and, for instance, fall back to
another rendering method, then perhaps you can leave it as is.

[wangp]

I think so. Lynx is used by default to render HTML as text but you can configure it to whatever you want. It doesn't behave that nicely when lynx is missing but it won't crash.

I'm considering changing the default to w3m.

Or we could remove the default entirely. I try to make bower work reasonably with little configuration but I'm not sure we can expect lynx to be installed these days.

[jgarte]

That's good to know. Thanks for the reply!

I like the idea of not having a default and letting the user choose which software they'd like to use to render html emails.

I'll share this thread with the Guix maintainers so we can discuss more on how we'd like to package bower.

[wangp]

I've removed the default HTML filter command on master.