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

[Eli Schwartz]

On 2/15/21 8:30 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
> 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.

The other problem I have with this in concept is, it is based on the
notion that you need --nowait because you've redirected stdout/stderr
for makepkg to /dev/null and you have zero ways to detect a completely
infinite loop that makepkg tries hard to notify you about.

This is not a use case I'm anxious to support, but... users may
implement this themselves by using:

makepkg && makepkg --packagelist | sudo pacman --noconfirm -U -

I would consider requiring this more verbose process to be a fair
tradeoff for people that have edge case needs, rather than adding a new
and IMHO confusing user-interfacing option.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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