[pacman-dev] Versioned packages on the command line.

Xyne xyne at archlinux.ca
Thu Nov 11 20:46:28 CET 2010


Hi,

If two repos (obviously not both official) provide the same binary package,
pacman will install the package from the repo that is listed first in
pacman.conf, if specified on the command line, e.g. "pacman -S foo".

If another package depends on "foo", the same thing happens, but if it instead
depends on "foo=1.4" and only the second repo provides it, then pacman will
correctly skip over the first repo and install it from the second.

If so, would you consider making it possible to specify versions directly on
the command line, e.g. "pacman -S foo=1.4". I know that it's possible to first
do a search for the package to see which repos contain it, then prepend the
repo, e.g. "pacman -S second-repo/foo", but it would be more useful sometimes to
be able to just specify the version using "=", "<=", etc. This would ideally
also work for detecting providers too, e.g. if "bar" provides "foo=1.4" then
"pacman -S foo=1.4" would install bar (or bring up the provider selection
dialogue once that's included... I really like that idea btw... considered
doing that in powerpill at some point)



For a possible use of this, see the following post on the arch-haskell mailing
list:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/arch-haskell/2010-November/000740.html


Regards,
Xyne


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