Overwrite dependency incompatibility

[wanne]

I like to play with a lot of mods and so I do a lot of fixes for other mods and try to do changes to get them interacting better with each other. But there is a limit: When mods recognized their incompatibility. While it is possible to unpack the mod and just modify the info.json this prevents you from playing online and since the most popular mod Authors (Erendel/Bob) are also those few who do not set their mods under free licenses it is also forbidden.

So please: Add the possibility to overwrite dependencies for other mods you depend on!

[Osmo]

Most (if not all) licenses mods use allow you to edit files locally. But also, you can ask the author to remove the incompatibility, and often they'll change it. An incompatibility can be replaced with a custom error message at data or settings stage that other mods could disable.

[protocol_1903]

Knowing that you're trying to use SE+bobs, you'll likely have to do a lot of local edits anyway. At which point there's no difference to editing info.json yourself.

[wanne]

But also, you can ask the author to remove the incompatibility

But there is a reason why they have these.
Originally I wanted also ask for proper boolean expressions in dependencies.
Here is a nice example:
For example aai-containers and 5dim-core won't even load together.
So I'm pretty sure Erendel would declare incompatibility if he would know about it. (I hope Erendel is not reading this.) Because he hates if things do not work perfect. (Even if there are workarounds). And rightfully so: In the end tat was the intention, why incompatibilities where introduced. You do not want do play through the 65550 options of your 16 mod to test which combinations are working.
But 5dim already fixed that problem with 5dim_compatibility everything works fine. Now the second option would be that Erendel adds 5dim_compatibility to its dependency. But this is even more ridiculous. Because that would mean that the little aai-containers mod that more or less everybody is using would indirectly depend on the complete overhaul mod 5dim-core which most users do not like...
So the right dependency would be more something like that:
!5dim-core OR ( 5dim_compatibility AND aai-industry )
But being able to declare something like that would not only require a change in the info.json format but also a sat solver for factorio to solve dependency problems. And one that not only one that finds a solution. But one that is searching for the one that seems to be the nearest to the users intentions. And I'm a 100% sure that tis is not going to happen at this stage of development.
It also requires a great deal of cooperation between mod developers.

So I was asking for the simple but less elegant solution: Let me change dependencies afterwards.

you'll likely have to do a lot of local edits anyway

Nope. Sadly SE does a lot in final-fixes. But so can you. And so you can overwrite everything.– except for the things in info.json...
I recently moved all the edits I did out of Krastorio2 witch I edited quite heavily into my own mod and played it on a bigger lan party. It worked fine and wasn't even much work. The factorio modding system is really good.

[wanne]

Bump...

[Rseding91]

This conceptually sounds simple but runs into a bunch of issues around multiplayer and installing required mods automatically. When the game is told to install a mod it iterates the dependencies of that mod in isolation and installs required ones according to the dependency. The same happens when updating a mod and it gains a new dependency. The game also tries to validate the active mod set on the manage-mods GUI - and if enabling or disabling a given mod *changed* other dependencies it further complicates any attempt to do that validation.

The entire dependency system is just not setup to handle them ever changing in this way.