Pacman

Historical bug tracker for the Pacman package manager.

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Tasklist

FS#3840 - pacman IgnoreDep/optional dep flags

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Michal Witkowski (Neuro) - Thursday, 26 January 2006, 08:16 GMT
Last edited by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Wednesday, 24 January 2007, 11:16 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category
Status Closed
Assigned To Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Architecture not specified
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7.1 Noodle
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

In Arch there are many packages which have vast dependencies just for the sake of having some features. Take KDE for example. I myself don't need ruby, but installing KDE requires me to install it along the way.

Removing packages after each upgrade is tiresome, especially that it needs to be done with the -df parameter passed to pacman.

The easy solution to this problem is implementing some sort of
IgnoreDep = ruby
in pacman.conf. This way pacman would ask during installation/update of packages wether I'd like to skip the said dependency. This is not much of work but would greatly simplify things.

The better (but requiring more work) solution would be to include a "optionaldep" field in PKGBUILDs. That way only the essential packages required to run the program we're interested in would be installed, and pacman would prompt the user wether or not he'd like to install the optional packages. Example:
"package 'ruby' is an optional dependency of 'kdebindings'. Install? [Y/n]"
Additionally an "IgnoreOptDep" option in pacman.conf could be supplied, so that pacman will never prompt for packages declared in it. However if one day I'd want to install something that really requires ruby, pacman would ignore the "IgnoreOptDep" field and would install ruby nonetheless, because it'd be the essential dependency.

I hope you understand my a bit vague explanation. The idea was discussed in the following thread:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=16863&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
This task depends upon

Closed by  Roman Kyrylych (Romashka)
Wednesday, 24 January 2007, 11:45 GMT
Reason for closing:  Duplicate
Additional comments about closing:  http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/4845
Comment by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Saturday, 28 January 2006, 10:55 GMT
I completely agree with Michal. This is a "must have" feature for Pacman.
I has no X on my servers but this problem is annoying for me too. For example php package depends on openldap but this is optional dependency, PHP works perfectly without OpenLDAP when you do not use LDAP functions.
For GNOME and KDE the dependency lists are overpopulated with optional dependencies.
And even Pacman has dependency on gcc and other stuff which would be not needed if abs and makepkg were in separate package.
I hope that Pacman 3.0 will allow much flexible configuration, and many of users' suggestions will be implemented.
Comment by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Wednesday, 24 January 2007, 11:45 GMT
Well, during the past year some packages were splitted to -clients, -libs etc., some unneeded deps were removed, so unneeded dependencies problem became less annoying.

I'm closing this FR in favour of #4845.

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