I shipped a support desk by deleting a dependency

I added a support desk to LaraFoundry this week. The first commit in the slice removed a package instead of adding one. LaraFoundry is a reusable SaaS core for Laravel that I'm extracting in public from an older app of mine. Auth, multi-tenancy, roles, activity log, notifications, billing seam, and now support tickets. The rule for every module is the same: lift the proven idea out of the old code, modernise it, harden it, and make it something you can composer require into a fresh Laravel app without inheriting a pile of assumptions. Tickets is where that rule got interesting, because the old code didn't own its ticket model. It leaned on a third-party ticket library. Why a ticket package is wrong for a reusable core A third-party ticket package is a perfectly reasonable choice when you're building one app. You get tables, a model, a status enum and a UI scaffold for free. It's the wrong choice for a core that other apps install. Pull it into the core and every host app inherits that package's migrations, its table names, its status vocabulary and its idea of what a ticket is. The dependency becomes load-bearing in projects that never asked for it, and the day it lags a Laravel release, every downstream app waits. So I cut it (decision D-4.2-1 in my notes) and wrote the model by hand. The model is about 180 lines. There is no magic. Two tables, a uuid, a status, a couple of scopes. The diff against "depend on the package" was less code in the core, not more, because I only kept the behaviour I actually use. Here's the top of the model, with the extraction notes I leave for future me: /** * A support ticket: the channel between a host user and the platform operator. * * Extracted from the donor App\Models\Ticket, which sat on a third-party * ticket package. That dependency is cut: this is a self-contained model. * Categories and labels are JSON slug arrays driven by config, not pivot * tables. The dead assigned_to column and the donor's invalid-operator * query are