Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu> writes:
On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:37 -0400 Jeremiah Dodds <jeremiah.dodds@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry if this is dragging up an old topic, but I've been poking around AIF as I'm interested in possibly (hopefully) bringing it up to speed and/or improving it, and I noticed that it's still in the repos, but isn't installable by anyone who doesn't happen to have grub legacy still installed on their system, unless I'm missing something.
This looks like a packaging bug which is rather general: a package in [extra] depends on a package from [community] or [aur]. AIF is one example, ruby is another...
Right, it's definitely a general issue.
Regarding AIF/grub, you could file a bug to either (a) move AIF to AUR, or (b) make grub-bios provide grub.
In this particular case, AIF *really* does depend on grub. I'm working on that though. I just noticed that it was available for install from extra still, and that got me thinking about repository consistency.
It seems like we'd want to avoid having to manually remove packages every time it becomes impossible to install a set of them. This might be my unfamiliarity with libalpm or pacman or any other myriad part of the stack, but it seems like the type of thing that could be handled by a utlity and a cron job fairly easily.
It also seems like the type of thing that wouldn't be too annoying to deal with manually at the moment, but that could get frustrating for both users and devs down the line. Menial maintanence tasks like that[1] tend to end up sucking down a lot of people's time and energy in the long run, in my experience.
If the lack of an automated "dead package remover" is just a "lack of time / patches welcome" type of thing, I'd volunteer to take a crack at writing the thing. If it isn't, I'd really like to know why.
By 'dead' you mean a package no longer available in the official repos? I would be for such tool provided I could disable it. For example, I still have grub-legacy and don't care to migrate to grub2, so I don't want pacman to remove my grub1.
By 'dead' I mean a package that depends on things in the repos that are no longer there. I was thinking of something that would be detecting these in the repo and removing their availability purely on the server-side so they didn't show up in -Ss, (or even just marking them in some way), not anything touching installed packages on the end of a user running pacman. At the very most, I'd propose having pacman warn the user about the situation so they knew about it, that's about it. -- Jeremiah Dodds github: https://github.com/jdodds irc : exhortatory