[pacman-dev] Optdepends (was: 3.2 "RC" release)

[Xavier]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>>
>> Well I am not sure Dan would like that after what he said here :
>> http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-July/007136.html
>>
>
> I have a completely different opinion. IMHO the current OptDepends is
> totally _useless_: who checks them with -Qi or -Si?! Personally I have
> no clue which packages have optional dependencies. I agree with Dan,
> that optdepends shouldn't be put to install file (they will be "hidden"
> after package install), but I like that they are listed.
>
> I think pacman should automatically print them during package install.
> (Here we have formatting/localisation difficulties) This behaviour
> could be disabled (to satisfy Dan ;-).
>

I think I was not very clear and transformed Dan's words too much.

I just talked with him and we agree on these two things :
1) printing optdepends is fine.
I actually asked an user to write a feature request :
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10630 , and I even assigned it to me.
But then I ran into annoying problems. Please help, since you care
about this issue.

2) messages like "check .pacnew file for new options" are useless.
pacman already prints a warning when extracting pacnew files anyway.
And you said yourself it might be overkill, so it shouldn't be a problem.