[pacman-dev] wanted: script to list uninstalled optdepends and packages that need them

[Allan McRae]

Xavier wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 6:29 PM, Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I had a thought today that a script to list package that are optdepends but
>> not installed could be quite useful...  I have not written one, but thought
>> it would be good for pacman-contrib if someone wanted to contribute.
>>
>> Example output:
>>
>> tk - optional for:
>>   ruby - for Ruby/TK
>>   python - for IDLE, pynche and modulator
>> fakeroot - optional for:
>>   pacman - for makepkg usage as normal user
>>
>> So get script writing!  Preferably in bash or perl (which the current
>> scripts use).
>>     
>
> If we implemented one of your suggestion for optdepends handling,
> which is to display when an optdepends is installed or not, then it
> should be very easy to do something of this kind, just using pacman
> -Qi and grep :)
>   


Maybe, but i think this script would still be very useful to show what 
you could install and what for.  I actually found it useful just now as 
I saw a couple of uninstall optdepends that could be used by more than 
one program.  That makes them far more attractive to install.

Allan