Arch Linux

nocain

Member

From: nowheresvill california

Registered: 2003-05-31

Posts: 62

Pacman question

Hello, first I have used Arch in the past mainly evaluating it, I did not have time to go in depth with it, however I am building a new system this week and will be putting arch on my old system.

I have a question as to the capabilities of pacman however so I know what to expect when I start installing items.

Here is My question is it possable using pacman to install only a package up to a certain point ie I don't use KDE have no use for the whole thing however I would like to be able to run certain KDE based apps, this of course requiers xfree86, qt, arts, and kdelibs.

Now what I want to know is from a base install can I use pacman to install kdelibs and will it automatically resolve the dependancies and install xfree86, qt, arts, and kdelibs, and nothing more, OR do I have to first install xfree86 then qt, then arts, and then kdelibs?

Like wise I do not use Gnome, however I do run Gnome apps such as evolution, I know which packages are requiered to run evolution without having to install all of Gnome, now will this be possible for me to do using pacman or will it resolve packages that are not really needed, however because the build script say you need all the Gnome packages?

Also in general how good/bad is Arch about having packages that have dependancies that are not realy dependancies, they were just suggestions, or resided on the so they got included as a dependany?

Sorry for the odd questions, not real big into the package management scene, compile most things myself

apeiro

Daddy

From: Victoria, BC, Canada

Registered: 2002-08-12

Posts: 771

Website

Re: Pacman question

Now what I want to know is from a base install can I use pacman to install kdelibs and will it automatically resolve the dependancies and install xfree86, qt, arts, and kdelibs, and nothing more, OR do I have to first install xfree86 then qt, then arts, and then kdelibs?

This will install only kdelibs (not all of KDE), complete with dependencies:

# pacman -Sy kdelibs

Like wise I do not use Gnome, however I do run Gnome apps such as evolution, I know which packages are requiered to run evolution without having to install all of Gnome, now will this be possible for me to do using pacman or will it resolve packages that are not really needed, however because the build script say you need all the Gnome packages?

Pacman will already know which packages are required to run gnome.  Just install the evolution package with -S and the deps come with it.

Also in general how good/bad is Arch about having packages that have dependancies that are not realy dependancies, they were just suggestions, or resided on the so they got included as a dependany?

Jason Chu wrote a package analyzer, namcap, which is a big help for us in this regard.  We use it to determine which runtime dependencies are necessary.  As for how successful we are, someone else might provide a better answer.  I would say we're pretty good, but there are definitely errors here n' there.

nocain

Member

From: nowheresvill california

Registered: 2003-05-31

Posts: 62

Re: Pacman question

Cool, Cool, Thanks for the quick reply