[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Dan McGee]

On 9/25/07, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Am Montag, 24. September 2007 18:30:36 schrieb Aaron Griffin:
> > Dan had the following suggestion:
> > optdepends=('cvs:required for git-cvsimport' 'foo')
>
> There are cases when you need more than one package to get a special
> functionality. So we would need something like:
>
> optdepends=('foo bar:required for foobar support')
>
> Of course we could also use a , instead of a space as delimiter here.
>
> Pierre

Is this overly complicated, however? Parsing is a hell of a lot
simpler in the original case. I know it seems weird, but:

optdepends=('foo:required for foobar support'
     'bar:required for foobar support')

would get the job done too. How many packages exist that would have an
extremely long list of optdepends with duplicate reasons? I know you
shouldn't design implementation around constraints of the programming
language, but in this case it just seems to make so much more sense to
not complicate the syntax.

-Dan