[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Aaron Griffin]

On 9/21/07, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> 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

Yep, there's an FR for exactly this. I can't find the one I'm thinking
of... but I did use the term "optdepends" - I think Roman used the
term "suggests"

Best i can find: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6626