Find a better solution to the unused Ctools dependency (for Starshot)

Thanks for pursuing this @TravisCarden. Streamlining the Starshot experience is a great incentive to getting the Ctools module issue sorted out, and removed from Pathauto.

Having a module in the code base that's not enabled is a minor annoyance at best, you'll have plenty of non-enabled modules in the code base.

Some of the previous issues are the ones where the actual work happened, yes, there have been 4-5 issues asking about this, but nothing was broken due to that, it's just low prio questions. Removing it is likely going to confuse dozens to hundreds of less experienced users that will get actual warnings and problems when upgrading. Pathauto has 300k installations on D8, and getting such an issue every few months is a price I'm happy to pay to avoid the alternative scenario.

Yes, a 2.x release will then remove it, but I have no plans to create that any time soon and I won't do it only for that. ctools is still actively maintained and has a D11 compatible stable release already, so it doesn't block D11 adoption either. If that ever changes then I might push for the removal to happen but until then, this likely won't happen.

Thanks, @Berdir. Your position is perfectly understandable. I will share as a matter of documentation, that the biggest reason I care about unused code in production is that I've had to rush deployments before for security vulnerabilities in modules I wasn't using and didn't have installed, and that, of course, is a risk a prefer to avoid. But as I say, I respect your position, and I thank you for your work on such a critical module. 🙂