I had a thought today that a script to list package that are optdepends but not installed could be quite useful... I have not written one, but thought it would be good for pacman-contrib if someone wanted to contribute.
Example output:
tk - optional for: ruby - for Ruby/TK python - for IDLE, pynche and modulator fakeroot - optional for: pacman - for makepkg usage as normal user
So get script writing! Preferably in bash or perl (which the current scripts use).
If we implemented one of your suggestion for optdepends handling, which is to display when an optdepends is installed or not, then it should be very easy to do something of this kind, just using pacman -Qi and grep :)
I've attached a script to list uninstalled optdepends for installed packages as Allan requested. I didn't spend much time on it though because Xavier's comment casts doubt on its usefulness. There may be a few bugs in it such as missed packages. I can probably improve it if you think it would be useful. Some caveats for the script: It parses the output of "pacman -Qi". It expects the above to be in English. It strips off the version specifications to simplify checks. It considers all packages provided by an installed package to be installed themselves. and yeah, I'm now folloing this list too