[arch-general] suggestion for pacman: Recommended packages.

[Xavier]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Hussam Al-Tayeb <ht990332 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 22:45 +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
>> Hussam Al-Tayeb wrote:
>> > The current case for many packages that use optdepends is as
>> follows.
>> <snip>
>>
>> I think some of this would be solved if/when we implement this:
>> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Pacman_OptDepends
>
> Thanks Allan. this is a good solution especially "optdepends can be
> removed with -Rs" and  "optdepends are not orphans unless a flag is
> specified".
> Thank you :)
>

Your proposal is not stupid, it would indeed make the optdepends
problems obsolete by getting rid of most of the optdepends, and
provide cleaner packages and dependencies.
Nagy had the same thought in a private discussion we had a while ago.

Of course then there is also an increased complexity of packaging with
a lot of splitting and a much bigger number of packages.
And with that example of pacman and rankmirrors, rankmirrors is a 190
lines python script. I don't think it deserved a package on its own.
Anyway for that specific example, some people were not happy about the
python dependency and rewrote rankmirrors in bash.