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

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:42 AM, wg2k <weight.gain.2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8242