i3 wm needs feh as a dependency

No, Feh is not needed by Variety for the more popular DEs (Gnome, Unity, etc.) and Variety does not provide separate packages for the different DEs, hence dependencies are driven by the most popular setup Variety would run on. i3 users are tech-savvy enough to install Feh manually.

Maybe a Suggests-entry or even a mention in the documentation that i3 requires feh?

There is no clear error message presented when the background set operation fails and it took me a few minutes to dig around the scripts to find the actual cause.

Adding it to the Suggests entries makes sense.
The i3 section on the "How to Install" page on the website
(http://peterlevi.com/variety/how-to-install/) does have instructions
for Feh. But I guess now that Variety is in the default repos and less
people pass through the site to install it, this is not enough.
People rarely read, so I it seems Variety will have to detect it's
running on i3 with missing Feh and suggest installing it.
The issue with this approach is that checking which DE we run on is
based on flaky fragile bits of code - there is no standard reliable
way of doing it. And I prefer not to put too much DE-specific code in
the program.

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 5:53 AM, Riku Lindblad
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Maybe a Suggests-entry or even a mention in the documentation that i3
> requires feh?
>
> There is no clear error message presented when the background set
> operation fails and it took me a few minutes to dig around the scripts
> to find the actual cause.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to
> Variety.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1584748
>
> Title:
> i3 wm needs feh as a dependency
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/variety/+bug/1584748/+subscriptions

Just adding the suggests-line should be enough of a hint to install the correct software for i3 users in my opinion.

The suggests line has been added for Variety 0.6.1 (via the PPA). A fix for Debian will be uploaded soon, which will eventually make its way to future Ubuntu releases.

This bug was fixed in the package variety - 0.6.2-1

---------------
variety (0.6.2-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release.
  * Merge upstream packaging changes:
    - Add depends on python-requests and python-imaging, removing python-pil.
    - Suggest feh for i3-wm support (LP: #1584748)
  * debian/ changes:
    - Bump Standards Version to 3.9.8 - no changes needed.
    - Fix python-distutils-extra build-dep version (should be >= 2.18, not >=
      2.10) (LP: #1368424)
    - Update watch file for new tarball version format used by upstream.
    - Override script-not-executable Lintian warning for install_ssl_deps.sh
      (not directly executed by the user).
    - Use https:// links in Vcs-* fields.

 -- James Lu <email address hidden> Mon, 29 Aug 2016 17:07:51 -0700