[pacman-dev] pactree, view the dependency tree

[Allan McRae]

Carlo Bersani wrote:
> Hello,
> this time I wrote a dependency tree viewer.
> Feel free to check it: comments are very welcome.
> I especially would like to know how it should behave with packages which 
> provide another one: I wrote part of the script thinking you couldn't install 
> two packets providing the same one, but Allan proved me wrong.
> At the moment the script is untested with multiple providers, but otherwise it 
> works quite well.
> The design choice of passing the directory instead of the packet name was ugly 
> in the end, but I was fighting with the scoping in bash at the time, so I 
> preferred to let things be; I might fix it.
> Hope you like it.
>   

I am going to give this a prod.   There is a slightly updated version on 
the forums (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=393865).

The only question I have for everyone is what is the best way to deal 
with provides?  e.g. Currently:

> ./pactree glibc
|--glibc
   +--bash provides sh
      |--glibc
   |--tzdata


But there is the possibility that multiple installed packages provide 
something  E.g. there are multiple packages that provide imap-server 
that don't (all) conflict:

bincimap/PKGBUILD:provides=('imap-server')
courier-imap/PKGBUILD:provides=('imap-server' 'pop3-server')
courier-mta/PKGBUILD:provides=('smtp-server' 'imap-server' 'pop3-server' 
'courier-imap' 'courier-maildrop')
dovecot/PKGBUILD:provides=('imap-server' 'pop3-server')
imap/PKGBUILD:provides=('imap-server' 'pop3-server')

So what is the best approach here?   If possible I think that continuing 
down the dependency tree if we find one installed provider is good but 
we should just list the providers if more than one.

Any opinions?

Allan