[arch-general] how to perform selected gnome installation with pacman?

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:06:27 +0000, Juan R. de Silva wrote:

> I'd like to install GNOME for my freshly installed base system following
> instructions provided on this page
> 'https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ GNOME#Base'. As you can see it
> reads:
> 
> "Install the base GNOME desktop"
> 
> # pacman -S gnome
> 
> And then: "This is a meta-package; which is a group of packages. An
> option will be given to install all or some of the packages in this
> group."
> 
> When I run the command above, the list of all files in group is
> displayed and the only option given to me is to answer Y/N to install
> the entire list of packages, that I would like to avoid.
> 
> I've read through man pacman carefully a couple of times and I've not
> found any option allowing to filter out undesirable file/s while
> installing a group. Tried to search arch wiki without any success.
> 
> Could anybody provide me with a hint here, please?

The best of all suggestions seemed to me to pipe the list of group files 
into a file, edit it and then to feed the file into pacman. However when 
I saw the list of 155 packages in in the file, I just gave up and 
installed the whole bloat.

At the end all I wanted was to skip 5 packages from the group. I found 
the task of editing a huge list manually ridiculously tedious and decided 
that it would be much easier remove them one by one after GNOME is place.

It's a pity  --ignore option in pacman is busted, it's seems to be quite 
important.

Thank you folks for you support.