[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Travis Willard]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:30:36 -0500
"Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

+1 - simple, straightforward, and since package names can't have colons
(right?  That's not permitted?) it leaves no room for ambiguity.

--
Travis