adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

bananabrain · 2010-06-26 17:50:30

The new version of pacman seems to behave quite differently to the old when adding a whole group like "xorg" or "gnome". Before, I would run `pacman -S gnome` and then be asked if I wanted to installl every package in the group. If I said "no", pacman would sequentially ask for a yes/no confirmation for every package. If I similarly answer "no" with v3.4 it it just drops me back to the shell.

So, to avoid certain group packages from being installed I have to run 'pacman -Sg [group]' and then individually add the required packages in the list. Is this behaviour by design? I can find no mention of it in the change log, and I would suggest the old behaviour was more useful.

Of course I may be missing something obvious, in which case, sorry - I'm still new to all this...

andresp · 2010-06-26 19:09:28

I agree.

I'm not sure of the reasons behind the change, however. I'm guessing there's a message about this on the pacman-dev mailing list.

falconindy · 2010-06-26 19:47:28

In the meantime, powerpill still uses the old behavior of letting you cherry pick packages within a group.

wonder · 2010-06-26 20:04:51

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/19853?project=3

bananabrain · 2010-06-26 20:18:48

andresp wrote:

I agree.
I'm guessing there's a message about this on the pacman-dev mailing list.

You're right, although the language here is a bit tenous for my simple mind:

http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/ … 10977.html

As an end user I could never feel the "anger" suggested in the thread toward the people developing all this excellent free software, but I do think it a tad disingenuous to publish the pros of pacman 3.4...

http://www.archlinux.org/news/503/

...with nary a mention of the cons.

Last edited by bananabrain (2010-06-26 20:19:27)

andresp · 2010-06-26 20:32:52

bananabrain wrote:

As an end user I could never feel the "anger" suggested in the thread toward the people developing all this excellent free software, but I do think it a tad disingenuous to publish the pros of pacman 3.4...
http://www.archlinux.org/news/503/
...with nary a mention of the cons.

I definitely got that impression aswell. The drawbacks have not been broadly
exposed, which imo is bad practice.

For example, the beginners guide and plenty of other articles depend on pacman
-S xorg and other group names. If this change had been stated clearly on the
news update, the whole transition process would've been smoother.

However, I have nothing bad to say about the pacman changes. I'm merely trying
to identify here; very rarely do I install whole groups of packages. In fact,
the new pacman -U behaviour made it more than worth it for me. Now I don't have
to keep a repo and cron repo-add in my LFS boxes, which is a huge plus.

My beef with 3.4 lies on the completely broken sudo makepkg behaviour, but I've
worked around it by keeping a patch queue.

tomk · 2010-06-28 11:54:47

There are no changes to group handling listed in the 3.4 changelog, so I guess it's a bug. Watch the report linked by wonder above, I'm sure a pacman dev will respond at some stage.

Allan · 2010-06-28 12:07:03

It probably should have been in the changelog as it is intentional....

What happened was that group handling was moved out of the libalpm backend as it is more of a frontend function. Problem was that it never got moved into the pacman frontend and none of the pacman developers cared about it enough to fix it.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-26 17:50:30

adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#2 2010-06-26 19:09:28

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#3 2010-06-26 19:47:28

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#4 2010-06-26 20:04:51

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#5 2010-06-26 20:18:48

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#6 2010-06-26 20:32:52

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#7 2010-06-28 11:54:47

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

#8 2010-06-28 12:07:03

Re: adding groups different under pacman 3.4?

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