Kevin Barry wrote:

One thing I've thought about is sometimes we have an executable that only works with an opt depends installed. That sounds more like an application that should have the dependency in "depends" instead of "optdepends".

__________ Brendan Hide

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:15:10 +1000 Allan McRae wrote:

...

Hi,

I have been thinking about optdepends and if we can improve the handling of them. So, given I am better at making wiki pages than patches...

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Pacman_OptDepends

What do people think about this idea? Are there other sensible additions to that proposal?

I know that optdepends were originally for getting rid of informational messages but I have some packages on my system that are installed "explicitly" when they are really (opt)deps for other packages.

Allan

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Some good suggestions.

1) Re: "optdepends are not orphans unless a flag is specified".

Maybe you could also just show the listing of all "orphans" (including optdeps) and next to it add something like "(optdep for package foo, bar)" where appropriate.

I would like a way of separating them because I think it is quite common to do a "pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qqtd)". Well, at least it is for as I install anything I test with "--asdep". I have changed that a bit as the stuff in brackets should not be printed with the -Qq flag.

2) I would really like a way to just "list all installed optdeps". that way. if you want to "clone" all installed packages to another system, you just need the list of installed packages and a list of the optdeps. (if you like the idea from the previous point, I can use that and just grep on optdep and I'm happy). Or maybe even one list of all explicit packages, with next to them their installed optdeps.

Well, I think in my proposal "pacman -Qtd --optdep | grep optdepend | cut -f1 -d' '", or something like that would work for this.

3)Re: "optdepends can be removed with -Rs" isn't this just the consequence of optdeps being installed with --asdep?

Sort of. It is mainly a consequence of pacman recognizing them as a dependency of the parent package, but --asdep of course plays a part. Feel free to add comments to the wiki page. I made it primarily for brainstorming. Allan

On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:59:35 +0100 Dario Freddi wrote:

Let me add more fire here: what I feel is really missing is an option (maybe a pmtransflag for implementation details) for installing optdepends. Otherwise, even with those suggestions, they really remain nothing but some lines of text. It could be implemented as a flag (better imho) or as a pacman.conf option

Well, you can install optdeps as regular deps, if you combine that with the new tricks that are proposed on Allan's wiki page then most (all?) use cases should be taken care of (cleaning up orphans, etc) without the need for anything too drastic. Dieter

On Friday 06 March 2009 01:15:10 Allan McRae wrote:

...

Hi,

I have been thinking about optdepends and if we can improve the handling of them. So, given I am better at making wiki pages than patches...

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Pacman_OptDepends

What do people think about this idea? Are there other sensible additions to that proposal?

I know that optdepends were originally for getting rid of informational messages but I have some packages on my system that are installed "explicitly" when they are really (opt)deps for other packages.

Allan

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