[aur-general] [ansible-aur] call for comment on pull request 50

[Roland Puntaier]

On Sat 21Jan23 19:04, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
>On 1/23/21 1:31 PM, Roland Puntaier via aur-general wrote:
>>On Fri 21Jan22 14:40, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
>>>pacman doesn't allow empty lists either.
>>
>>Yay does allow empty argument list.
>
>I don't care what some AUR helper does. Most of them are broken

What do you mean by broken and which packages do you mean?
Don't answer this. What I'm saying is just
that it is quite a general claim, which takes effort to proof.
You don't want to waste your time to prove that.
Neither do I to prove you wrong.

>, and none of them are pacman so pacman does not care.

Pacman should not care. I agree.
And so ansible.aur should care about pacman, either.
You yourself mentioned pacman as an argument for ansible.aur.
It is a fallacious argument to say: A does this, so should B.


>>Empty is like 0: mathematics allows 0.
>
>Erm, what. This is nonsense.

It fits the question.
"I want ansible.aur to install 0 packages from AUR."
It can do that using the mathematical sense of 0.
0 is a number like every other.
The mathematical sense of 0 gives my statement a meaning.
So it is not nonsense.

>
>>I made a pull request to pacman on github to make the error a 
>>warning instead.
>I don't know where you submitted some pull request, because the pacman 
>project is not on github. It's possible third-party entities have 
>uploaded a copy of the pacman source code to github, but that's really 
>quite meaningless since they -- per definition -- could not merge it 
>and expect that to affect the pacman project itself.
>
>Anyway, if you did submit it to the right place in accordance with https://archlinux.org/pacman/submitting-patches.html#_submitting_your_patch 
>then I don't see it getting accepted. I for one am against it.

This is my pull request. The repo is mention your site:
https://github.com/andrewgregory/pacman/pull/1

I honestly believe that also pacman should treat 0 packages like it treats n packages,
as interface to humans and to scripts that use pacman.
This can be done without extra effort for the computer.
It can save effort to programmers of future scripts.
It would have saved effort for pacman itself to create all the translations of a message that is not 
needed. I did of course keep that effort and just tansformed it to a warning in my pull request.
I think it unlikely that the change breaks existing scripts.
It did not break the pacman tests.

As a general argument:
An interface should be kept minimal.

Allowing 0 packages makes 0 no special case.
This avoids the need to communicate a special case.
All users do not need to read about the special case
or handle that special case in their code.

My effort is to improve ansible.aur, because I want to use it,
and since it came up by chance, why not improve pacman, too.
I use that, too.
If you are against it, it won't get in.
It is no big deal for me.
I can live with it. Pacman is good and ansible.aur, too.
I just wanted to make it a little better.


>
>-- 
>Eli Schwartz
>Bug Wrangler and Trusted User
>