On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
Hi, pacman has an option --asdeps so the user can install packages as if it were deps. In fact, such packages will be treated exactly the same as normal dependencies: <blah> What are your ideas? Thanks, Dieter
That explanation made my head hurt.... So to put it succinctly, you want a category for packages that are sort of dependencies, but not real dependencies, but are not explicitly installed either. So something you install because (e.g.) it is an optdepend.
I can see your point, but it does seem that adding another category of package is a bit extreme. I do run into this problems as I have to install optdepends as explicit as I use --asdep as a mechanism to keep track of packages I am testing so I can just remove orphans to clean my system. Maybe an option to set what packages you install something as a dependency of is a compromise (still not sure how that would work....).
This seems more like an issue with dependency resolution than anything else. Assuming this is all based on issues with optdepends, like so: $ pacman -S foobar Optional dependencies for foobar: baz $ pacman -S --asdep baz What we have here is 'baz' indicated as an orphan, but what we *want* is baz indicated as "Required By" foobar, correct? If so, then it is just a matter of adding more logic to the optdepends property. That is: a) Split entries on ':', and resolve package names (warn if not found?) b) Use optdepend packages when resolving things like orphans and requiredby lists. If I understand your qualm right, this would be a better way to handle this.