FS#23698 - man page should have separate -dd

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee) - Monday, 11 April 2011, 13:12 GMT
Last edited by Florian Pritz (bluewind) - Sunday, 16 October 2011, 20:45 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category General
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.5.1
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Summary and Info:
Current -d option is confusing since its extended version is --nodeps, a quick read can skip the last line which indicates that proper 'nodeps' behaviour is implemented by -dd. I suggest the following:-

-d extended version be changed to --noverdeps
-dd, --nodeps be added to man page/pacman help. Description can simply be 'Skip all dependency checks'

I believe this would be more easily understandable. See [1] to see an example of the questions which sometimes pop up.

1 - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=916839#p916839
This task depends upon

Closed by  Florian Pritz (bluewind)
Sunday, 16 October 2011, 20:45 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Additional comments about closing:  We don't encourage to use these options, so we won't list them.
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Monday, 11 April 2011, 16:33 GMT
I am not against the first suggestion (--nodeps -> --noverdeps), although I think this is still silly. There is no such thing as "proper" nodeps behavior, once you enter into that territory you are doing things wrong or we are not accommodating what you want to do appropriately.

I still strongly feel that people should 1) not be using -d nearly as much, and 2) learn to read as the need to specify -d twice is quite clear in the manpage. Every other option that needs to be specified twice is not documented separately. And the one thing we forgot to do was addressed in  FS#23433 .
Comment by Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee) - Monday, 11 April 2011, 16:46 GMT
For me this is simply a semantics change. 'nodeps' seems to me to indicate that no dependency checking is done, at all.

As to not using -d as much, yes I agree that its easily misused. Unfortunately as long as the AUR isn't covered by pacman, I don't think there's any way to update packages with versioned deps without -dd. Also when someone needs to downgrade a specific package to test whether it caused a problem he probably doesn't want to temporarily downgrade everything else from that upgrade.

Concerning other options, it is my own opinion (which may not have anything to do with reality) that -Rss and -Sgg are much less used (and their use is not forced) compared to -Rdd. -Syy is arguably more often used than those two, but should only be used when something goes wrong, while -Rdd has 'valid' uses (AUR) which have nothing to do with any packaging/installation error.
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Monday, 11 April 2011, 16:49 GMT
> I don't think there's any way to update packages with versioned deps without -dd.

How the hell does the new '-d' not work in this situation? This is exactly what it was implemented for... You've also said upgrade in one sentence, and -Rdd in another, so I don't even know if we are talking about -S, -R, or both here.
Comment by Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee) - Tuesday, 12 April 2011, 01:55 GMT
Sorry, late night confusion in previous post. I'm referring to the situation with (for example) the update of nvidia and nvidia-all (or nvidia-beta/nvidia-beta-all) where to install nvidia-utils-beta I'd have to -Rdd nvidia-beta-all first. Hence an upgrade, but done using -R...
Comment by Florian Pritz (bluewind) - Tuesday, 12 April 2011, 06:11 GMT
> I'm referring to the situation with (for example) the update of nvidia and nvidia-all (or nvidia-beta/nvidia-beta-all) where to install nvidia-utils-beta I'd have to -Rdd nvidia-beta-all first.

You can just use -U if the conflicts and provides are correct.

When writing the patch I tried to be consistent with -y/-yy so if you don't like that change all descriptions not just -dd.

@Dan: -d is a transaction option and behaves the same for -U -S and -R afaik.
Comment by Karol Błażewicz (karol) - Sunday, 16 October 2011, 15:56 GMT
Status?
I agree that every '-xx' should be explicitly mentioned, not just '-dd'.

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