[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Scott Horowitz]

On 9/24/07, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Am Samstag, 22. September 2007 11:39:56 schrieb Nagy Gabor:
> > I like the idea, but many users like the current no-interactive pacman
> > (libalpm) behaviour; and asking user whether he wants to install optdepends
> > (or select some of them to install) can lead huge number of questions.
> > So I like the current method; but that would be nice, if we could easily
> > list optdepends, indeed. A new list_optdepends function in install script
> > may help, which can be called after package install on request, too.
> > Bye, ngaba
>
> Listing them would be enough. Should be quite easy to implement, won't it?

Listing them would certainly be helpful, but many pkgbuilds already
echo optional deps in their .install file.

I hear the sentiment of Nagy's email, but I think those users could
easily be accommodated. For example, you could have something in the
pacman.conf like OptDepends = Prompt, and a user who doesn't want to
be prompted could comment it out. I could also imagine that when you
do get prompted, there is a way to say "no to all" or "abort".

Or, maybe pacman could list out all the optional depends in a list:
1. foo                2. bar
3. baz
and then the user could type "1 2" if they wanted those two installed,
or "A" for all. I don't know, this would be a quick way of seeing and
specifying everything that I would like, but maybe not others :)

Scott