Hi, I've just seen the mail https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.... on the "staff only" list. Since this probably affects AUR packages and other places where the whole community is involved such as the Wiki and unofficial repos I think it should be discussed here as well. Am Montag, 4. März 2024, 14:43:54 CET schrieb Balló György:

In short term, we should revert this commit [3] at distribution level to avoid breakages.

That would be much appreciated, also from my point of view as AUR package maintainer and maintainer of an unofficial repository. (If official packages need to be updated then I assume the same also applies to AUR packages. This will probably take even longer as every maintainer will have to take care of their packages individually.)

In long term, we have to decide via RFC what to do with libdepends and libprovides. We could probably make a slow, manual transition to the new 'autodeps' feature in pacman, but it still does not support optional autodeps, [4] which means that would be impossible to mark any binary deps as optional.

That's of course problematic for plugins or binaries only required for optional features. I think we need a solution for that before enabling this new 'autodeps' feature globally by default. I also hope that the 'autodeps' feature will not run into problems with special libraries, e.g. ones that are only intended for cross-compilation purposes like https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/android-x86-64-zlib. It would be very annoying if one had to exclude those libraries manually. Having to add `options=('!autodeps')` would probably be ok although it means updating tons of AUR packages maintained by different people and of course also updating the relevant Wiki pages. Speaking of the Wiki: It still mentions library dependencies, e.g. in the last paragraph of https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#depends. This section should be updated and the alternative be documented instead if you decide to actually remove the support. It would also make sense to announce that change on https://archlinux.org so people actually know that they should stop using libdepends/libprovides. Note that I think moving forward with 'autodeps' is generally useful. For maintaining my own repository I even introduced a feature in my build service to keep track of all the dependencies on soname-level so I know when I'll have to rebuild packages. So this is the right approach - we just need to be careful no break existing packages/workflows without a transition period and clear announcements. Best Reagards Marius