On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 19:09 -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
2. Showing me these optional things every single time I install is stupid. Use optdepends and educate people to use -Qi.
What about storing this information in the package database and let pacman use the information when installing/upgrading. On debian, when I install something with apt-get, it tells me that some packages are getting installed, and also tells me there's some suggested packages that you could install. In addition to that, aptitude just installs all the optional crap in the "suggests" fields. I don't like the aptitude behaviour, but I can imagine new users would like to have a flag for pacman that just installs all optional features.
I do agree that these install scriptlets for messages is getting out of control. Another thing is that once you've installed a package and deleted pacman.log, you won't have any other way that catting /var/lib/pacman/local/pkgname/install to find out what are the optional dependencies.
Yeah, optdepends was intended to go this route. Right now it's only viewable with -Qi, but that's just as good as the install scriptlet messages. I think at some point I wanted to add in a "list optional" command that would list all optdepends for installed packages and the reasons. I agree with Dan. Please use optdepends for this. The format (please correct me if I'm wrong) is something like: optdepends=("foobar: install this to make babies" "barfoo: this one adds a peppery aftertaste" "baz: for those of you using a diesel powered barbie doll")