[pacman-dev] group handling in next release

[Xavier Chantry]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 2:13 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Xavier Chantry
> <chantry.xavier at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 1:44 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Haha, whoops! I went a little crazy cherry-picking and started
>>> grabbing stuff that looked good.
>>>
>>
>> Heh nice raid indeed :)
>> I did not touch pacman for 4 months, maybe it's time to get back on
>> track. I always have lots of new not-pacman things to work on though.
>> Anyway I am guessing my git repo is empty now.
>>
>> I just checked nagy one, and there is still the -D patch dying there :
>> http://repo.or.cz/w/pacman-ng.git/shortlog/refs/heads/working
>> Too bad we did not come to an agreement last time it was sent to ML.
>
> Yeah, I'll try to look that over and see what I can remember. I do
> feel bad having work sit out there unused.
>
> I'm thinking a release of what we have in a month or so? That seems
> feasible given our normal slow pace and would at least let the 140
> patches since 3.3.X get out there. Obviously some of the bigger
> changes I would like to do still haven't happened, but that shouldn't
> hold us up here.
>

I don't remember if I brought this up before. I intended to..
I have one problem. It seems this commit could make a lot of users unhappy :
http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=b4317a740ac2d4f5e4d1aa56a97171c52be70d02

While I was writing this mail, I was sure I brought this up already. I
just found some old jabber chat.

6:46 PM me: hey
	51 minutes
7:38 PM toofishes: hey
  whats up
7:39 PM me: I should let you know I had a complaint from wonder about
my rework of group handling
7:40 PM toofishes: what was the complaint?
 me: you know this old behavior :
  :: group gnome-extra (including ignored packages):
eog vino
:: Install whole content? [Y/n] n
:: Install eog from group gnome-extra? [Y/n]
:: Install vino from group gnome-extra? [Y/n] n
  I lost that when moving group handling to backend
 toofishes: yeah
  what does it do now again?
 me: lost all the interaction / questions
7:41 PM it should just select everything without asking
  select all targets from the group
7:42 PM this morning I asked on IRC if any users used/liked that
feature, I got another two very positive answers
7:43 PM http://code.toofishes.net/cgit/dan/pacman.git/commit/?id=b4317a740ac
  the reasons of this change were explained by nagy in a mail :
http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2009-June/008847.html
7:44 PM to sum up : the frontend can query what is in a group and gets
a list of packages pmpkg
 toofishes: yeah
7:45 PM me: but it can only add the name of package : char * as a
target to the transaction
  i.e. there is a loss of information
7:46 PM the same package name can be in multiple repo. or there can
even be provisions
7:49 PM toofishes: yeah
  we should either accept pmpkg_t
  or accept a "unique" name like 'repo/pkg'
  the former seems smarter
7:50 PM me: note that by moving group loading to backend, I worked
around / eliminated that problem
7:51 PM the backend can just query the group and do whatever it wants,
in particular it can add the pmpkg to the transaction itself without
problems
  but now.. if I think about interactivity and being able to only
select some packages from a group
7:52 PM also if I think about what a different frontend, especially
graphical one would do
7:54 PM it seems it makes more sense to let the frontend handle that.
just give the ability to return a list of pmpkg from a group. but then
allow to add a pmpkg or list of pmpkg as a transaction target