Ideally, the framework will depend very little on external software1. However, to avoid reimplementing (and maintaining) existing technology, the framework will need to depend on some external software. To determine whether the framework should gain such a dependency, one should carefully evaluate what burdens that dependency will place on the developer and, more importantly, on the user.
Footnotes
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External software means any software not provided by the code under development.
It can be software that is either natively provided by the system or installed onto the system. ↩