On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 01:25:38PM +0200, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
- in a backup/restore or clone system scenario the usual approach is to do 'pacman -Qe' to get a package list. When restoring/installing the list on another box this means we install only the explicit packages and their dependencies. Some packages we installed ourself --asdeps will get lost. This is not always good. A current workaround would be to install these packages explicitly, but doesn't always feel right either because we don't want the package explictly, although we do want them because they provide features to a package even though it's not really needed. In fact, this is very similar to the 'recommends' directive in debian package. Many arch packages literally say 'install x to have feature foo, install y to have feature bar' (these are the 'recommended' packages). If the user then installs x or y they are not really explicit packages (because we only want them because we use another package that recommends them), but they are not dependencies either (otherwise they will get lost)
What you should do is install those packages explicitly and they should be registered as explicit packages but also show up as dependencies.