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

[Emil Velikov]

Hi Allan,

On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 01:30, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> 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.
>
Would you be opposed to having the wait/no-wait logic within
pacman/libalpm itself?
It is something that I've wanted, plus a few friends have mentioned it as well.

Consider the following:
 - we no longer leak locking internals outside of libalpm - makepkg, tests, etc
 - pacman can take some time - relatively large update, slow internet
connection, slow dkms builds (esp. for the nvidia drivers)

The bonus point: using "pacman --wait" would greatly simplify the
locking needed for archlinux-repro.
The bug you mentioned a week or so ago - the fix is an extra set of
nested locks for a) initial setup vs b) installing asp/devtools to
fetch the PKGBUILD.

Thanks
Emil