Arch Linux

icemaze

Member

Registered: 2009-11-07

Posts: 6

Is there an equivalent to aptitude's (un)markauto

Sometimes when I remove a package I do pacman -Qdt and I find out I need a package that was installed as a dependency. Is there a way to modify the "Install Reason" of the package so that it's marked as "explicitly installed"? I mean, other than:

pacman -R package && pacman -S package

Thank you!

Runiq

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-10-29

Posts: 1,053

Re: Is there an equivalent to aptitude's (un)markauto

man pacman sez:

--asexplicit
           Install packages explicitly; in other words, fake their install reason to be explicitly
           installed. This is useful if you want to mark a dependency as explicitly installed so it
           will not be removed by the --recursive remove operation.

Works fine if the package is still in the cache. Modifying the install reason is a different beast though…

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Dotfiles

icemaze

Member

Registered: 2009-11-07

Posts: 6

Re: Is there an equivalent to aptitude's (un)markauto

Yaay, I got it!
Inside /var/lib/pacman/local/package/desc there is a "%REASON%" line (followed by a "1" on the following line) if the package was installed as a dependency. Setting the second line to "0" (or removing those lines entirely) does exactly what I need and pacman -Qdt doesn't show the package anymore.

It would be nice to have this as a pacman option.