[pacman-dev] pacman-disowned

[Jeremy Heiner]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 9:10 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Why call both -Qk and -Qkk?   So lets say any external script calls -Ql
> and -Qkk.   Two things.

Hi, Allan,

35% of the packages I have installed lack an mtree. And -Qkk performs
no checks at all for those. Sure, I guess the external script can use
the -Ql to fill in the gaps that -Qkk didn't check. But that's just
shifting the work around: one fewer exec of pacman, but someone's got
to perform those checks. If I were writing the script I would just as
soon let -Qk take care of it for me instead of reimplementing
something pacman can do for me.

> Given if cchecking for unowned files is part of pacman, it _will not_ be
> part of -Qkk, both -Qkk and -Q --unowned will need called.  Two things...

The consequence of this decision is that the user will experience
twice the necessary run time, or three times if they want to also
check packages lacking mtrees.

> Also, I think this is the key factor to excluding this from pacman.
> From your implementation:
>
>     for ( item <- List( "dev", "proc", "run", "sys", "tmp",
>       // these look wrong, but see .head & .tail below
>       "certs/etc/ssl", "locale/usr/share", "pkg/var/cache/pacman" ) ) {
>
> I assume these are exclusion lists.   They will always be incomplete and
> non-portable so need to be configurable.  We are not having such
> configuration in pacman.conf.

Those are only there because it's my script that I use on my system
and I've hacked it to suit my needs. It's just a prototype, not the
final product. I have not suggested, nor would I ever, that these be
incorporated into pacman. A simple "|grep -v exclusion-pattern" is all
that would be required to achieve what my hack does, and would
certainly be the preferable solution for pacman.

Jeremy