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

[Xavier Chantry]

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.