This is related to a massive annoyance of mine: when I run a piece of software and the system is missing a required dependency, I want the software to *tell me* that dependency is missing so I can make a decision about proceeding or not. Instead it seems that far too often software authors will try and be “clever” by silently installing a bunch of dependencies, either in some directory path specific to the software, or even worse globally.

I run a distro that often causes software like this to break because their silent automatic installation typically makes assumptions about Linux systems which don’t apply to mine. However I fear for the many users of most typical distros (and other OS’ in general as it’s not just a Linux-only issue) who are subject to having all sorts of stuff foisted onto their system with little to no opportunity to easily decide what is being heaped upon them.

Ruby gems and CPAN have build scripts that rebuild stuff on the user's device (and warn you if they can't find a dependency). But I believe one of the Python's tools that started the trend of downloading binaries instead of building them. Or was it NPM?