[pacman-dev] What about managing optional dependencies?

[Roman Kyrylych]

2006/10/12, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com>:
> it may look like this in PKGBUILD:
>    optdepends=(pkgY "allows to use X")
>    optdepends=(pkgZ "adds ABCD feature")
>
> and this in pacman output:
>    Optional dependencies:
>      pkgY - allows to use X
>      pkgZ - adds ABCD feature
>
> This is just a way to handle optional dependencies in a better way,
> IMHO. This is not something hard like USE flags.

This way Pacman will know something about optional dependencies and
use this info for something. For example, when user wants to remove a
package, Pacman can search if this package's optional dependencies are
not used by other packages and promt user to remove them too. IMHO
this will be good feature.

And it will allow to show optional dependencies in website package list too.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)