Pacman

Historical bug tracker for the Pacman package manager.

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Tasklist

FS#76229 - Extra information using pacman

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Alen Asenie (Lunatik00) - Monday, 17 October 2022, 15:48 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Monday, 17 October 2022, 23:26 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category General
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 6.0.2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

With pacman -Si you can see the info of a package, but it would be better if the info shows if the package is installed, the same goes for dependencies and optional dependencies, and in search it also would be better if we could seek the optional dependencies and see the info of the packages that are optional dependencies from the search of the parent, for example, if i do pacman -Ss dolphin it should show the current search , but if i do pacman -Ss --opt-deps it could show a tree with the parent package and then the optional dependency packages, or the dependency packages.

The reason why this would be useful is to search optional dependencies that weren't installed alongside the program and now are missing and the user doesn't know what the dependencies are, for example, sticking to dolphin, if I installed arch using the archinstall command instead of manually I will not see the optional packages at all, now, if I decided to use kde and dolphin there is a chance that the thumbnails are not available, which would lead me to think it is a problem with the dolphin package or with the OS while the real reason is that a package was not installed.

The optional packages and what they do should also be shown during updates, because that increases the chances that the user will see what they might have missed previously, I think those changes to the information shown could be a good quality of life improvement for the users that don't know as much yet, it will also be handy for users that do know, making easier to find the dependencies that they didn't installed because they didn't needed them when they installed the parent application, an example here could be when an user changes hardware and now they could use another optional dependency. I know there is a bunch of things here but I think all point to the same possible improvement (I don't think it is a problem since pacman -Si shows the info but improvements can be made)

Thank you for the great software, I am forever grateful for this amazing OS.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Monday, 17 October 2022, 23:26 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Comment by Doug Newgard (Scimmia) - Monday, 17 October 2022, 16:06 GMT
I think you're looking for -Q
Comment by Alen Asenie (Lunatik00) - Monday, 17 October 2022, 22:53 GMT
-Qi in fact does accomplish what I think should be done in -Si, I missed that one because is non intuitive to see something you search to install in the flag that means query, but that is only one of the points, and one of the least important for quality of life, it would be better if it was intuitive, but as long as it works that is fine, yet we still could have the other things, probably there are aur helpers that do something like the tree when searching,I think the most important would be to show the dependencies when updating, many people won't even know that they are lacking an optional dependency that would make their workflow easier, they just see that it doesn't work like they want to, case in point, even I missed that one of the things was there, just non in an intuitive manner, and I do read the options in a program.

The common part I was referring to is to is the lack of intuitive access to the list of optional dependencies and that users can not know there are optional dependencies that are not installed
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Monday, 17 October 2022, 23:26 GMT
Optional dependencies are shown on package install, then any new additions on each update.

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