[pacman-dev] how should pacman choose? flags? groups? ...

[Xavier]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 08:52:45PM +0200, ngaba at petra.hos.u-szeged.hu wrote:
> > I install acidrip which depends on mplayer, I most likely want mplayer to be
> > pulled, not mplayer-svn.
> OK, I understand this, and you are right, but I think, there is no 
> definition for package "priority", if you _define_ that provide is not 
> as "strong" as the "canonical" package, I will follow that rule. 
> (Anyway, I think only one mplayer version should be exist in repos)
> 

Well it's not obvious indeed, but I still think it's safer to keep it that
way, at least for now.

> Let me explain an other (theoretical) example:
> Suppose that there is two kernel package in the sync repos: "vanilla" 
> and "beyond" (RIP). And there are module packages compiled for them, 
> such as nvidia-vanilla and nvidia-beyond, both provides nvidia. User 
> does "pacman -S nvidia-utils" (which depends on nvidia). User has the 
> beyond kernel installed, but pacman decides that it will install 
> nvidia-vanilla and thus the kernel vanilla... probably the user doesn't 
> want this. We can minimize the number of installed dependencies in 
> alpm_resolvedeps or minimize the needed disk space etc. etc. but that 
> wouldn't worth our effort.
> A bit off, for package maintainers:
> Personally I like the way, that I described above, and sometimes this 
> "binary gentooish" packaging way would be nice. I mean, sometimes there 
> are some  very interesting but mutual ./configure options; in these 
> cases multiple binary packages can be very helpful (-alsa, -oss, -gtk1, 
> -gtk2, ...) and user could choose. These packages can be "identical" 
> through provide.
> Any idea for this? flags? (special) groups (beyond and vanilla in our 
> example) which helps pacman in the decision? [pacman must choose from 
> nvidia-vanilla and nvidia-beyond and if these packages "flagged" by the 
> groups vanilla and beyond, pacman can do a "-Qg vanilla" and "-Qg 
> beyond" and it will see, that the installed vanilla group is empty, so 
> probably the user wants to install a beyond package]

It looks like handling these cases would add a lot of complexity, while it
doesn't seem to involve a lot of work from the user.
For example in this case, just do pacman -S nvidia-beyond first. I think
that's realistic, and other cases like this one should be easily solvable
too, but I could be wrong.