[pacman-dev] Sg and Rg options && categories

[Xilon]

On 9/21/07, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
> During I wrote this paragraph, I started to like the category idea:
> http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7132
> I start to understand the differences between groups and categories: Groups is
> designed to install a set of packages, categories is desinged to install few
> packages from that. So category may contain conflicting packages (imagine mta
> category here). However, I still prefer using groups as categories.

Categories are very nice and I'd really like to see them implemented.
Categories should _not_ be installable, that, in my mind, is not the
purpose of categories. Their purpose is to make searching easier and
more organised. Currently it's very hard to search for something
without knowing the name. If you want some sort of graphics
manipulation program, then you won't necessarily find all of them
since you depend on the description or a descriptive name (which most
packages won't have). If we had categories we could just skim through
the "graphics" (or whatever) category and see all of them there.

> But I can't
> imagine how we could do "pacman -Sg mta" with the current fronted: it's annoying
> that if the group has 100 members, I must answer to 100 questions, if I don't
> want to install the whole group/category.
> This method would be much better (but harder to implement):
> media group has the following members: 1-xmms, 2-audacious, 3-bmp, 4-moc ...
> Which packages do you want to install? 2,4 [or I could answer A (all)].

Yes, I just noticed that yesterday when we were having the discussion
about pacman -Sg, etc, on IRC. It's very annoying for large groups, so
pacman should really be more flexible in the ability to exit. Of
course you can Control-C, but that's not "clean" (yes, I know that
under the hood pacman cleans up nicely). When asking whether to
install all packages in a group, it should have the option to abort.
Also when asking for individual packages it could have to option to
break out, or skip the rest of the packages and just download what you
have selected so far. I guess this should be posted as a feature
request rather than on the ML though :)