Arch Linux

Stefan Husmann

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-07

Posts: 955

Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

Hello,
I would like do have a PKGBUILD depend on a whole group of packages. Group in the sense of pacman handles groups. Is this possible?

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

Try it to see if it works.

BTW, what do you want to package? I can't think of any reason why a package would depends on a group.

Stefan Husmann

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-07

Posts: 955

Re: Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

Try it to see if it works.

BTW, what do you want to package? I can't think of any reason why a package would depends on a group.

As you may gave guessed I tried and it did not work.

The backgrond of my wishes is not explaine in two words, but I will try.

There is an package named xindy in the aur. This package did not work for me due to some unrelated reasons. So I wrote my own PKGBUILD and finally succeeded. But in one step I got an LaTeX error concerning missing fontencodings, and found, that I missed some of them which are included in some packaeges installed by the texlive-lang group.

The maintainer seems to be a natively croatian-speaking person, an so I am guessing he has at least texlive-langcroatian installed on his computer. But it is difficult to find out which encodings are really needed and in which texlive-lang package these encodings are included. And so my first idea was to hav texlive-lang at least as an makedependancy.

I hope I explained it in an understandable way.

Stefan Husmann

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-07

Posts: 955

Re: Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

As I tested now, in fact it is sufficient to have texlive-langcroatian. This is astonishing.

Cerebral

Forum Fellow

From: Waterloo, ON, CA

Registered: 2005-04-08

Posts: 3,108

Website

Re: Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

Yeah, in general, it's a bad idea to depend on a group.  The group's contents can change pretty easily, and you'd be pulling in a bunch of stuff that you really don't need - here at Arch we prefer to avoid bloat as much as possible, and depending on a vague group would definitely introduce bloat.

I'm glad you found out which package you really needed in the depends.

Stefan Husmann

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-07

Posts: 955

Re: Defining a group of packages as (make-)dependency

You are absolutely right. Rethinking my question I came to the same conclusion.