Currently, if the beagle development libraries are present at compile time, f-spot will require the beagle runtime libraries. This means that distribution packagers can't turn on the beagle functionality in f-spot without introducing a hard dependency upon beagle, even for users who don't want or use it.

If an extension point is added for handling when DB items are changed, the Beagle support can move into an extension, and f-spot could run without it. This would also perhaps allow a Tracker plugin to be written, for instance.

This report has been prompted by http://bugs.debian.org/458897