[pacman-dev] [RFC] New member selection when installing group

[Allan McRae]

On 20/10/10 05:25, Xavier Chantry wrote:
> One part of what's on
> http://code.toofishes.net/cgit/xavier/pacman.git/log/?h=working is
> about proposing a new interactive selection for installing groups.
> I did not like the old one, because I don't want to answer 50
> questions when I install one group with 50 members. This is ugly, and
> the selection is not easily reproducible, for example you cannot
> easily copy/paste the answers of one run to another.
> I think a text frontend really sucks for this kind of workflow, a
> graphical or at least ncurses frontend would do much better.
>
> But my new provision selection inspired to both Jakob and Dan that we
> could have the same for groups, so I went ahead and implemented it
> over the weekend.
>
> $ pacman  -S base-devel
> :: There are 11 members in group base-devel:
> :: Repository testing
>     1) make
> :: Repository core
>     2) autoconf  3) automake  4) bison  5) fakeroot  6) flex  7) gcc
> 8) libtool  9) m4  10) patch  11) pkg-config
> Which ones do you want to install?
> Enter a number (default=all):
>
> Multiple choices are possible, separated by spaces.
> Either single number or a range a-b.
> Both single numbers and range can be negated with ^ prefix.
> Choices are applied successively, so each choice override previous
> ones (in case of conflict).
> If first choice is negative, all targets are implicitly selected,
> otherwise no target is implicitly selected.
>
> Examples :
> 1) 3 6 8 : install automake, flex and libtool
> 2) 2-11 : install all targets in core repo
> 3) ^1 or 1-11 ^1 : install everything but make (like 2))
> 4) ^2-11 : install everything but targets 2-11, i.e. only testing/make is left
>
> No idea how practical / user-friendly it is, so feedback and testing welcome.
>

My general impression of this is that it is really, really good and a 
great improvement over what we have now or had in the past.   Here are 
relatively minor comments:

The "Enter a number" selection prompt is a bit weirdly worded when using 
e.g. "1-10 ^8".  Maybe "Enter selection" instead?

If the "selected 1" output is to stay (is it?), it should maybe say 
"selected <pkg>" instead?

Also, using "1-10 ^8" says "selected 8... unselected 8".  If that output 
is to say, I guess that should just say "unselected 8" maybe?

Doing a "pacman -S base --needed" processes the --needed after the 
selection dialog which is annoying... is that easily changed?  It does 
not matter if not.

Allan