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#1 2006-01-02 15:49:17

tezem
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Registered: 2004-11-04
Posts: 51
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remove unused dependencies

It's very nice to be able to remove also unused dependencies of a package with -Rs but what I would find very useful too is an option to remove all unused dependencies on the system which are not installed by the user itself and don't act as a dependency to other packages any more.
Packages with removed deps should be also removed by this option but this should work with confirmation I think.

What do you think about such an option? It should be technically possible without much work I guess and it would be a great improvement for cleaning up old, longrunning systems.

The other thing I would like to see is a nice idea to solve the third party installer problem.   big_smile
To explain this problem I can give you two examples.

1. Perl is capable of installing packages over it's own system. (cpan)
Since there are very many packages in this repo and only a few in the pacman repos I see it as a problem. The problem comes up if you have to decide which method you will use for installing new packages. The cpan method is my favourite because you can get all packages and not only a few. The drawback on this is that pacman don't know that this package is installed on the system but in my opinion it should know it even if it was installed with a third party package management. You lose the single package management point with this behaviour which is really bad.

2. Eclipse and it's package management. It's very equal to the Perl example but on this example I can tell about the resulting problem. When a plugin is installed over the eclipse package management and some time later a new version of eclipse will be released, it's not possible to update eclipse with all it's plugins. If you want to update to the new version you will lose all your installed plugins and you have to install all of them again, manually.

I only want to know if some people out there realized the same problems and know of some solutions.

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#2 2006-01-02 17:55:50

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: remove unused dependencies

Re unused dependencies: if you know a bit more bash than I do, you should be able to script this. pacman -Qi <pkgname> shows if the package is required by any other, and if it was explicitly installed or as a dependency.

Re perl: I've built a few perl modules recently, so I did come across this issue. I don't think cpan is the right solution for Arch - better to buiild Arch packages for anything that isn't already in our repos. If you browse the AUR, as well as the officila repos, you'll see a lot of perl modules are available this way.

If you don't feel like making your own packages, let me know what you need and I'll do them for you.

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#3 2006-01-03 04:56:20

elasticdog
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From: Washington, USA
Registered: 2005-05-02
Posts: 995
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Re: remove unused dependencies

I've wondered about issues such as these with using the Ruby Gems package management system.  Some things (like Ruby on Rails) are just way too difficult to install without using it, but using it does cause the problem of having two separate package management systems watching over your files...

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#4 2006-01-03 10:57:59

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: remove unused dependencies

If we're serious about using Arch, we should make full use of pacman and ABS to deal with these issues. I'm not familiar with Ruby, but looking at the perl situation again, it's clear that many of us are prepared to do the work required to produce PKGBUILDS for perl modules as they are needed. You're suggesting this can't be done with Ruby, elasticdog, so that implies that you, or somebody, has tried - is that correct? I see plenty of ruby-related submissions in the AUR, many of them in [community].

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#5 2006-01-03 14:02:05

tezem
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Registered: 2004-11-04
Posts: 51
Website

Re: remove unused dependencies

@tomk: yes you are right when you say that there should exist a package for everything and if not make it yourself and install it.
The only problem there is that sometimes it's very hard, at least for me, to make a package and sometimes, no everytime ;-) I want to install stuff very fast without having to deal with things I don't want to deal with. But I agree that this is only a dream.  roll

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#6 2006-01-03 14:32:39

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: remove unused dependencies

I know what you mean, tezem. cpan, eclipse, gems - very handy, quick, no doubt about that. I think you should continue using them, but also post a package request here. Someone will probably build and submit it, and you can then replace the cpan package (for example) with the AUR one. Realistically, this is the only way our repos will expand - nobody's going to sit down and PKGBUILD their way through the entire perl archive, but we will build up the repos based on actual user demand.

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#7 2006-01-03 16:20:58

tezem
Member
Registered: 2004-11-04
Posts: 51
Website

Re: remove unused dependencies

Yes thats the best mid term solution I guess but for long term http://autopackage.org/ comes to my mind again and I thought about it.
Autopackage is a very nice installer for 3rd party software. It's not very popular now but I hope it will increase steadily. They plan to implement code, so everything you install with autopackage will be realized by the native package manager too.
This is for sure a lot of work but is very important.
And this give me the idea to create a general adapter for all packet managers available. So somebody could easily write the interface side to his packet manager and so all packet managers compatible to this adapter would be compatible with the others.
So you would have autopackage for 3rd party software not available in any other package management compatible with the native package manager, a native package manager and others like cpan which use the adapter to be integrated into the native one.
But I think this is a too heavy work with too little interest of too little people.

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