[pacman-dev] [Feature Suggestion] Option to install packages one-by-one when upgrading

[Lakshay Garg]

Hello all

This is my first email to the pacman mailing-list and I am writing to
suggest and discuss a possible feature for future versions of pacman.

[Problem] Whenever a full system upgrade is run with pacman -Syyu,
pacman downloads all the packages which need to be installed and then
upgrades all at once. This approach sometimes leads to problems on
computers with unreliable internet connections as in my case. It often
happens that while downloading one of then several packages to be
upgraded, one of the download will get corrupted and in the end when
it tries to install, none of the packages would get upgraded due to a
single corrupted package. In such a case, I run pacman -Scc followed
by pacman -Syyu to try and upgrade again leading to lots of wasted
data and time.

[Suggested Solution] What I suggest is that a new commandline flag be
created in pacman which changes the default behaviour. When the flag
is enabled, pacman downloads upgrade files for a single package (or a
few interdependent packages) and upgrade it and then move on to
upgrade other packages. Thus installing packages one-by-one.

[Request] Please let me know if this is a possibility or is there
another way my problem can be solved without modifying pacman. I am
willing to contribute the patch myself if you can guide me on how to
proceed. Would like to know if anyone is interested.

--
Lakshay Garg
Senior Undergraduate, EE
IIT Kanpur