[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Aaron Griffin]

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?

I'm going to tackle this when I can. For *NOW* we're just going to
list them in the -Qi output and do nothing with it.

Dan had the following suggestion:
optdepends=('cvs:required for git-cvsimport' 'foo')

This way we can get rid of the "reasons" echoed in the install files
and clean those up as well.

Once we have optional depends in place, we can start doing fancy
things with it, but for now, this shouldn't be much extra code.

What do you guys think of the "dep:reason" syntax?