Remove the ctools dependency if it's not needed

I don't think so since I installed pathauto and ctools is still disabled.

The project page explains this.

Note that for backwards compatibility, the composer definition still depends on the ctools project, but it's no longer installed on new projects and existing projects may uninstall it if they are not using it.
https://www.drupal.org/project/pathauto/releases/8.x-1.11 →

I was wondering why this dependency is still installed but I can disable ctools without issue.

It seems to me you should be able remove from composer.json.

If people still need it there is nothing to stop them from including it in there dependencies or global project composer.json

e.g.

   "require": {
        "drupal/ctools": ^4*"
    },

This unnecessary dependency causes an unnecessary update as previous version of ctools is listed as unsupported.

That said, I do see a potential issue where ctools is still enabled in the database config. Removing it would be a breaking change. i.e. it is still needed to uninstall it. Potentially that would be a breaking (major) change.

Is there a plan to drop this entirely? E.g in a 2.x branch? Could also drop Drupal 9 support in there ;)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.