[pacman-dev] support of optional dependencies

[Aaron Griffin]

On 9/25/07, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

While I agree with Dan here, I already know of one package that would
fit this bill.

I think, for right now, lets stick with what Dan has above... for
multiple packages we'll just list them a few times, we can mold the
syntax later once it's already in place.