On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Connor Behan <connor.behan@gmail.com> wrote:
A crazier idea is "changing dependencies" during installation instead of using -d. One complaint about Arch is e.g. python2-matplotlib "depending" on python2-pyqt4 when really it can be configured to use gtk instead. If there was something like When = PostExtract, a script could edit the .PKGINFO file and switch qt to gtk. However, it would probably be stupid to make pacman extract all the .PKGINFO files before resolving dependencies.
If you can then add the qt dep (and capability) back when installing qt4 to your final scenario, things get even weirder. Because then the package doesn't depend on just one, but both these packages, in case you were going to remove gtk (and needed -dd to do so). This again makes me think about "at least one of" groups of dependencies, which aren't really compatible with the current approach with bash arrays (except for some ugly prefix or suffix magic I'm not willing to call a solution). cheers! mar77i