[pacman-dev] Doing more stuff with optdepends

[Kevin Barry]

One thing I've thought about is sometimes we have an executable that
only works with an opt depends installed. Running that executable will
give a nasty error message about unable to find library. It'd be nice
to have some kind of "This program requires the gtk+ package, please
install with pacman -S gtk+". Similar to what ubuntu does with a bunch
of common linux programs. I don't have any great ideas on
implementation though. I think it'd have to be some kind of system
where packages register their optdepends and have an install and
uninstall action, then when pacman installs a package it checks to see
if any already installed packages have registered that one as an
optdepends and execute the install action for that package.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been thinking about optdepends and if we can improve the handling of
> them.  So, given I am better at making wiki pages than patches...
>
> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Pacman_OptDepends
>
> What do people think about this idea?  Are there other sensible additions to
> that proposal?
>
> I know that optdepends were originally for getting rid of informational
> messages but I have some packages on my system that are installed
> "explicitly" when they are really (opt)deps for other packages.
>
> Allan
>
>
>
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