[pacman-dev] [RFC] [IDEA] Possibility to ignore specific dependencies

[Florian Pritz]

Hi,

I'm thinking about having perl packages depend on a more specific perl
version (like a provided perl-5.20 instead of simply perl), but that
brings the same issues we currently have with kernel modules. Everything
that's not in the repos will prevent a clean upgrade because it depends
on the old package.

One idea to get around this would be to add an option like
--ignore-dependency perl-5.18 which means that something like -Syu (or
-S, -U and similar) will error when there are dependencies for
perl-5.20, but will not error when there are packages installed that
depend on perl-5.18.

Side note: Not yet sure how the final syntax will look like, that - as a
separator seems like a bad choice because it's ambiguous (where does the
pkgname end if there doesn't have to be a pkgver?)

This is a more controlled form of -d if you will. Optionally I'd also
want this to work like -dd if used as "--ignore-dependency perl" which
means that all perl dependencies will be ignored, but dependencies on
other packages will not.

Obviously this will not only be useful for perl, but also for linux
modules, though I don't have any of those installed from AUR so I don't
know if people for other workarounds.

This is only an idea for now, depending on feedback I'd look into
implementing it.

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