On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Jan de Groot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 19:09 -0500, Dan McGee wrote: >> 2. Showing me these optional things every single time I install is >> stupid. Use optdepends and educate people to use -Qi. > > What about storing this information in the package database and let > pacman use the information when installing/upgrading. On debian, when I > install something with apt-get, it tells me that some packages are > getting installed, and also tells me there's some suggested packages > that you could install. In addition to that, aptitude just installs all > the optional crap in the "suggests" fields. I don't like the aptitude > behaviour, but I can imagine new users would like to have a flag for > pacman that just installs all optional features. > > I do agree that these install scriptlets for messages is getting out of > control. Another thing is that once you've installed a package and > deleted pacman.log, you won't have any other way that > catting /var/lib/pacman/local/pkgname/install to find out what are the > optional dependencies.
Yeah, optdepends was intended to go this route. Right now it's only viewable with -Qi, but that's just as good as the install scriptlet messages. I think at some point I wanted to add in a "list optional" command that would list all optdepends for installed packages and the reasons. I agree with Dan. Please use optdepends for this. The format (please correct me if I'm wrong) is something like: optdepends=("foobar: install this to make babies" "barfoo: this one adds a peppery aftertaste" "baz: for those of you using a diesel powered barbie doll")