[arch-general] Uninstallable Packages

[Leonid Isaev]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:37 -0400
Jeremiah Dodds <jeremiah.dodds at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Sorry if this is dragging up an old topic, but I've been poking around
> AIF as I'm interested in possibly (hopefully) bringing it up to speed
> and/or improving it, and I noticed that it's still in the repos, but
> isn't installable by anyone who doesn't happen to have grub legacy still
> installed on their system, unless I'm missing something.

This looks like a packaging bug which is rather general: a package in [extra]
depends on a package from [community] or [aur]. AIF is one example, ruby is
another...

Regarding AIF/grub, you could file a bug to either (a) move AIF to AUR, or (b)
make grub-bios provide grub.

> 
> It seems like we'd want to avoid having to manually remove packages
> every time it becomes impossible to install a set of them. This might be
> my unfamiliarity with libalpm or pacman or any other myriad part of the
> stack, but it seems like the type of thing that could be handled by a
> utlity and a cron job fairly easily.
> 
> It also seems like the type of thing that wouldn't be too annoying to
> deal with manually at the moment, but that could get frustrating for
> both users and devs down the line. Menial maintanence tasks like that[1]
> tend to end up sucking down a lot of people's time and energy in the
> long run, in my experience.
> 
> If the lack of an automated "dead package remover" is just a "lack of
> time / patches welcome" type of thing, I'd volunteer to take a crack at
> writing the thing. If it isn't, I'd really like to know why.

By 'dead' you mean a package no longer available in the official repos? I
would be for such tool provided I could disable it. For example, I still have
grub-legacy and don't care to migrate to grub2, so I don't want pacman to
remove my grub1. 

> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  unless, of course, it's not actually a menial task, in which case
>      please enlighten me
> 

-- 
Leonid Isaev
GnuPG key: 0x164B5A6D
Fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
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