On 9/24/07, Pierre Schmitz
Am Samstag, 22. September 2007 11:39:56 schrieb Nagy Gabor:
I like the idea, but many users like the current no-interactive pacman (libalpm) behaviour; and asking user whether he wants to install optdepends (or select some of them to install) can lead huge number of questions. So I like the current method; but that would be nice, if we could easily list optdepends, indeed. A new list_optdepends function in install script may help, which can be called after package install on request, too. Bye, ngaba
Listing them would be enough. Should be quite easy to implement, won't it?
Listing them would certainly be helpful, but many pkgbuilds already echo optional deps in their .install file. I hear the sentiment of Nagy's email, but I think those users could easily be accommodated. For example, you could have something in the pacman.conf like OptDepends = Prompt, and a user who doesn't want to be prompted could comment it out. I could also imagine that when you do get prompted, there is a way to say "no to all" or "abort". Or, maybe pacman could list out all the optional depends in a list: 1. foo 2. bar 3. baz and then the user could type "1 2" if they wanted those two installed, or "A" for all. I don't know, this would be a quick way of seeing and specifying everything that I would like, but maybe not others :) Scott