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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, optdepends was intended to go this route. Right now it's only
viewable with -Qi, but that's just as good as the install scriptlet
messages.

I think at some point I wanted to add in a "list optional" command
that would list all optdepends for installed packages and the reasons.

I agree with Dan. Please use optdepends for this. The format (please
correct me if I'm wrong) is something like:
optdepends=("foobar: install this to make babies"
                     "barfoo: this one adds a peppery aftertaste"
                     "baz: for those of you using a diesel powered barbie doll")