[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Adds a --nowait option

[Allan McRae]

On 13/2/21 3:21 am, Daniel Radetsky wrote:
> Apologies if gmail ruins this. I'm used to github prs & don't have time to
> setup mutt at the moment.
> 
> If pacman is in use, makepkg -si will wait until it is available. This
> can be undesirable if you aren't running makepkg -si in the normal
> interactive way. For example, if you're running it from ansible (so
> shell output is supressed), and you also have a pacman -Syuw running in
> another terminal which you forgot to confirm, it will hang forever and
> you won't know why.
> 
> More generally, if you're running it in any kind of non-interactive
> environment, you may want it to fail fast instead of waiting for some
> other condition to resolve.

I'm not commenting on the patch itself, but rather the idea.

My initial reaction to this was "no".  If you are running makepkg from
ansible but "pacman -Syuw" manually in another terminal, you are doing
many things wrong!

This waiting for pacman was added under the assumption that pacman
operations are relatively short, and will eventually finish.  I'm not
sure the use case that a user run pacman but switched terminals and
forgot to confirm the operation is something we should consider.

So, I am still leaning to rejecting this, but am open to being convinced
otherwise.

Allan