[pacman-dev] Addition of a new package in a package group and how pacman handles it

[wg2k]

Hey all

I will briefly describe the situation: yesterday, Gnome 2.24 hit the  
repos. I issued "pacman -Suy" and, lo and behold, next time I logged  
in I was running Gnome 2.24. So far so good. But then I noticed that  
certain parts of Gnome were not there at all!

It turns out, it doesn't matter if I have originally installed the  
package group named gnome and gnome-extras, their contents have  
changed (new packages added) but I did not get the new packages.  
Instead I had to issue a pacman -Suy --needed gnome gnome-extras in  
order to get the full package list.

Now, I was wondering if this is on purpose or not and in my humble  
opinion, this is very counter-intuitive. When I first issued the "full  
upgrade" command, I didn't merely expect the system to bring all my  
packages to the latest version, I expected to have a "current" system,  
exactly as it would be if I had done a clean install. In fact, that's  
the main reason for choosing Arch: the fact that it is rolling  
release! This means, I expected the package manager to be smart enough  
to say "Aha, he wanted gnome and gnome-extras back then and I see no  
reason for him to *not* want the new gnome and gnome-extras now, let's  
install them!"

Granted, this could be circumvented by issuing:
$pacman --needed -Suy gnome gnome-extras
but why should I be on the lookout for when a new gnome is out, for  
instance? Isn't that the job of the package manager?

Here's an idea: why not keep track of package groups the user has  
*explicitly* installed and then by doing a "full-full upgrade" (let's  
say pacman -Syuu, double u), bring the new packages in? I could also  
argue that this behaviour should be the default one. Thoughts?