[aur-general] TU Application

[Xyne]

Kaiting Chen wrote:

> >
> > What do you need base-meta and base-devel-meta for?
> >
> > pacman -S base and pacman -S base-devel install every package of these
> > groups. And with this method you always automatically get the latest
> > group packages.
> >
> > pacman -Rs base and pacman -Rs base-devel deinstall these groups.
> >
> > Btw., base is automatically installed during the first installation
> > from the install CD anyway. And not having base installed can have
> > curious effects.
> >
> > I'd rather suggest deleting these packages from AUR.
> >
> > Heiko
> >
> 
> I adopted those packages from orphan status. It's for people who like to
> manage their dependencies carefully. Thus one need only base-devel-meta as
> explicit and the rest of the toolchain (gcc, patch, etc.) can be made into
> dependencies without showing up in pacman -Qtd. I don't actually use those
> packages.

Hehe, this came up in the pre-application discussion. I knew someone would
mention this. :P

Metapackages behave differently than groups. Once a group is installed it is no
different than a set of unrelated packages expect that they can be removed
together with a single command. If the members of a group change, the user will
not be informed and would have to run an extra command to make sure that the
package is up-to-date. Removing old members is also difficult as they are
explicitly installed and thus do not show up as orphans.

A metapackage resolves these issues and also reduces the clutter of "pacman
-Qe".

I've discussed the merits of metapackages vs groups at length before (check the
forum and pacman-dev mailing list). Basically, if optdeps were handled
properly, metapackages would be much better than groups imo.

Anyway, in this case, I'm still not sure whether such packages belong on the
AUR, but I don't see what harm they do and others clearly find them useful, so
this shouldn't be an issue.

Regards,
Xyne