[pacman-dev] some limitations of the current front-end, new -D option

Xavier shiningxc at gmail.com
Wed Sep 12 13:26:52 EDT 2007


On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 07:15:45PM +0200, Miklos Vajna wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 04:44:16PM +0200, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
> > So what about a new -D (like database) operation: set of commands to modify
> > localdb (for experts only;-)?
> 
> -D is already used by makepkg. though a relevant patch is here:
> 
> http://git.frugalware.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=pacman-g2.git;a=commit;h=09414be392cfe85b0359877d60c5cf4260a0845f
> 
> so that if foo requires libfoo and libfoo is marked as DEPEND, and later
> a use does a -S libfoo its reason will be changed to EXPLICIT. relevant
> test:
> 
> relevant tests:
> 
> http://git.frugalware.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=pacman-g2.git;a=commit;h=4c7e0306d79d3aa8b482eb73152c5a70f824c4d3
> 

There are some particular cases where the previous behavior was better
imo. Mostly when you reinstall a package for testing/debugging purpose,
because you have some problems with it.
Some users even try to reinstall all installed packages sometimes. This would
lose all REASON information.

The better thing to do is probably have it fully configurable. Being able to
set the reason to explicit, to deps (--asdeps) or to keep it (current default
behavior).




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