[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Add short options for mark as deps or explicit

[Sébastien Luttringer]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 09:29:55AM -0600, Dan McGee wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Sébastien Luttringer <seblu at seblu.net> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> >> On 07/03/13 15:30, Andrew Gregory wrote:
>> >>> On 03/07/13 at 02:51pm, Allan McRae wrote:
>> >>>> On 07/03/13 06:31, Dan McGee wrote:
>> >>>>> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:19 PM, William Giokas <1007380 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>>>> On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 02:03:14AM +0100, Sébastien Luttringer wrote:
>> >
>> > -d is used by --nodeps, do you have a suggestion for a short option
>> > for --asdeps?
>>
>> Not every operation deserves a shortopt; these are used so much less
>> than other operations that I don't feel the loss of self-explanation
>> is worth it.
>
> +1. We've made a point of explcitly *removing* the shortopts for
> infrequently used or dangerous options (-k no longer exists for
> --dbonly, and -f for --force has gone away). I tend to think that
> anything involving the -D operation can be destructive and infrequently
> used. Let's not go in the opposite direction of this.

Here, there anything destructive to mark a package as explicit or as
deps. It instructs pacman about your usage of a package to be able to
act accordingly.
I use it frequently to clean the output of "pacman -Qtd" to be able to
run "pacman -R $(pacman -Qdtq)" to clean my system.
Although my use doesn't mean frequently for anybody else, I guess that
behavior is sane and could be recommended to keep an archlinux system
clean over the time.

Allow users to instruct pacman about which package are here by choice
or by dependency of another chosen package have nothing to do with
force an installation
of a package when pacman detect something which should not be done and
ask users to bypass its judgment.

Technically I tend to think there is no lost of meaning adding a short
option here, mainly because we don't remove the long form, and people
which want to be meaningful should use long options. Taking the
opposite, -D is completely dedicated to marking packages and nobody
argue to remove -D and let only --database because it's not frequently
used.
I'll probably not able to convince anyone on this because I think that
short options are only syntax sugar and every long options should have
its counterpart _except_ for dangerous options.

Cheers,
-- 
Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer
https://www.seblu.net
GPG: 0x2072D77A