[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Jeff Horelick]

2010/1/10 Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com>

> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Jeff Horelick <jdhore1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This would likely require 2 changes to pacman to implement:
> > 1. Pacman would have to know that libpng8 is the newer version of libpng7
> > and prompt users to install that (or do it as a upgrade keeping the old
> > package).
>
> Is that needed ? Newly rebuilt packages that need libpng8 would depend
> on libpng8, so libpng8 would be picked up that way.
> If you have no packages requiring libpng8, there is no need to install it.
>
> > 2. Pacman would have to know something was removed from the repo and
> somehow
> > notify the user and possibly give them a [Y/n] to remove it from their
> > system. (I personally think this is a good idea to implement anyway).
> >
>
> pacman -Qm
>

(GMail sucks at mailing lists, this is the best way i can handle this
without wanting to hurt myself)

1. I suppose it isn't needed, i was just thinking more about user
perception. If it looks like a upgrade, users generally are less likely to
complain as opposed to if it looks like a new dependency for a package they
have. Just a thought.

2. pacman -Qm has 2 flaws that i see. For one, it'll also list all your AUR
packages, it'd be nice to maybe just list packages that were installed from
the repos but are no longer there and ignore any manually installed
packages. For two, i was thinking something a bit more obvious to the user
(i've been using Arch for 2 years now and i didn't know about pacman -Qm)
that would display on 'pacman -Syu' that after the packages were installed,
something like: "libpng12 and libjpeg7 are no longer being used by any
packages, would you like to remove them [Y/n]". I'm thinking this would be
good because there could be a lot of clutter on the system if you have to
check for "deprecated" packages manually.