On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 14:51, Judd Vinet wrote:
But I'm still not convinced. To me, a package manager should do a small number of things and do them very right. I don't know if a plugin system would be worth the time and effort. Maybe we should try and come up with a list of 5-10 solid pluggable ideas, ones that wouldn't deserve to go into pacman proper. We don't need to implement them all, but it would help to justify the need.
I think I know what Judd is hinting at. He wants a dancing Jesus plugin. But anyway, if we want Pacman to really be integrated into the Arch experience, a "framework" mentality would be best. If we want Pacman to be just one tool, the current path is fine. To keep with my (crappy) example, The "tool" ideal is more in the Slackware direction. No one uses Slackware for its package management, it's just there to install/remove packages. Nothing special. Debian on the other hand really makes Apt/DPKG/Dselect part of why you choose Debian. This may seem contradictory to my previous posts, but I like Pacman as an independent tool as well. Obviously there's such a things as underpowered or too independent, but Pacman isn't even close to there. As an example, I kept my Menu script agnostic of Pacman, because I felt there was no reason to create a big web of "integration". Another example is how I feel package maintenance should be done. Arch shouldn't try to "include everything". Just showing I'm not that much of a hypocrite :P. I was just throwing out ideas. The practical side, which Judd has wisely taken, is that Pacman really isn't missing that much. So what if it won't do every magical thing. Even APT/DPKG doesn't do everything, and it's probably the most worked on package manager out there. I like Arch Vanilla. Then again, I have lots of free time. Ben -- I was overjoyed when, having bought a Fujifilm camera, I realized I could justify having /mnt/fuji on my system. -- /.