[arch-dev-public] Please stop the install message insanity

[Jan de Groot]

On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 19:09 -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
> 2. Showing me these optional things every single time I install is
> stupid. Use optdepends and educate people to use -Qi.

What about storing this information in the package database and let
pacman use the information when installing/upgrading. On debian, when I
install something with apt-get, it tells me that some packages are
getting installed, and also tells me there's some suggested packages
that you could install. In addition to that, aptitude just installs all
the optional crap in the "suggests" fields. I don't like the aptitude
behaviour, but I can imagine new users would like to have a flag for
pacman that just installs all optional features.

I do agree that these install scriptlets for messages is getting out of
control. Another thing is that once you've installed a package and
deleted pacman.log, you won't have any other way that
catting /var/lib/pacman/local/pkgname/install to find out what are the
optional dependencies.