Re: [pacman-dev] command line arguments

On 9/29/07, Xavier wrote:

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On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 01:48:29PM +0200, Nagy Gabor wrote:

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A bit off in this thread, but the current command-line handling of pacman is chaotic, for example the bahaviour of -Quil is not defined. We should restructure a bit, we should categorize options: (my example assumes -S) -operation: -l, -i, -c, -l, -p, -s, -y ... <- more than one allowed (pacman try to do all requested operations) -loadtarget/targettype-modifier options, -g, (--provider), -u (!!) ... <- only one allowed -trans_prepare/new-target-pull options: -d, (--noconflict option), -e ... <- more than one allowed -trans_commit options: -f, --asdeps, -w (do nothing) ... <- more than one allowed As an example, I explain what should pacman -Quetcl do: List all explicitly installed outdated not-a-dependency-of-other packages and show their changlogs and filelists ;-)

I think that's a good idea, but a lot of work again :)

It's always "a lot of work". C'est la vie.

This is why Dan and I like to harp on people for patches. We're just two guys, and we both have full time jobs (ok, I now have a second job if you look at the main Arch page) and social lives.

It's hard to do everything everyone wants.

That's also why I love when people run their own git branches. I don't have to do much extra. I remote update and voila! I have all your work to import.

It's amazing.

Keep up good the work guys.

OK, I will explain a viewpoint of a patch-sender ;-) First of all, all of us have few freetime. To tell the truth I would radically rewrite some parts of pacman. This could be done at one night (in one-person hobby-projects (unlike pacman) the maintainer can do this easily ;-). But I cannot do that, because: -if I send a huge patch, you may not like the result and reject my patch, so I wasted a lot time [so I won't send huge patches] -if I send smaller patches depending on each other (to prevent myself from useless work) I have to wait a lot for your review/apply, and the one-night-work may become a six-months-work ... [my deps.c and sync.c patches were sent about 2 months ago, and I'm waiting now for your apply/reject, I cannot continue my work until your decision...] So patch-senders cannot help more, we just send patches... Please don't ask us to create a git repo etc., that is needless, if you can _easily_ "decode" our patches, that should be enough. I appreciate your work on pacman as a developer (!many thanks, again!), but you should see that sometimes you and Dan slow down the development (by sitting on patches). I didn't want to hurt anybody, this was a criticism of a development _model_. However, I cannot suggest better... but I would give git access to some talented&enthusiastic guys <- not me;-). Because if I have not enough time for a project, I will search for other guys, who will enjoy help me <- Aaron: cf. mc Arch package bugs ;-). Note: English is not my native language, so I cannot express myself as clearly as I could in Hungarian, so my e-mail may be hurtful or whatever, sry. Bye, ngaba ---------------------------------------------------- SZTE Egyetemi Könyvtár - http://www.bibl.u-szeged.hu This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/