[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Pierre Schmitz]

Hi,

while working on php I realized that I really need something 
like "optionaldepends" in a PKGBUILD. I am not sure about the current status 
of this; the last time it was decided that we print some message to the user 
using the install scripts.

But I am not very happy with that kind of workaround. It would be much cleaner 
to have such support in makepkg/pacman itself. It would be enough if those 
are just information which the user can ask for if needed. Currently you have 
to grep through pacman.log to see those messages after you have installed a 
package.

It could be implemented the following way:
PKGBUILD
	optionaldepends=('package':'optional description why you might want to \
			  isntall this optional package' \
			 'next package')
makepkg
	treat optionaldepends like makedepends
pacman
	show optional packages and their (optional) description after install
	add a switch to show those information after the package is allready
	installed

As an example of how "userfriendly" our current solution is see 
<http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/devel/php/php.install?rev=1.5&cvsroot=Extra&only_with_tag=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup>

Pierre

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archlinux.de