What is the conventional wisdom (if any) for handling conditional dependencies in modules?
For example, I have a logger class wrapped around Log4perl that supports screen, email, and syslog appenders, and each appender can be individually toggled on or off. Is it better to force the dependencies on the underlying syslog and email modules at the top of the logger class, or is it acceptable to bury those imports in the methods that actually do the initialization of each appender? It sort of comes down to whether I want the issue detected at compile time or run time I suppose, but is generally frowned upon to put imports down inside class methods? Thanks for any insight. m.
