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

[Jakob Gruber]

On 01/20/2011 06:32 AM, Kaiting Chen wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Juan R. de Silva<juan.r.d.silva at gmail.com
>> 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<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/%0AGNOME#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?
>>
> You can just go ahead and do this, `pacman -Sg gnome | awk '{ print $2 }'>
> tempfile`, then edit that tempfile and delete the packages that you don't
> want, then do `pacman -S $(cat tempfile)`. --Kaiting.
>

Or:

pacman -Sgq gnome > tempfile

Choosing packages from a group interactively has also been 
(re)implemented a couple of times in the past couple of months; nothing 
has been merged into the pacman repo though (AFAIK).