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I'm in a situation where I installed the kde-applications-meta package, but that causes a dependency where I am not allowed to mix and match the default software. Most of their stuff is good but there are a few application that I've replaced with alternative (for example, VLC instead of their video player). I'm new to pacman so
1. How can I mark all the dependencies of kde-applications-meta as user-installed so they remain once I uninstall the meta package and the meta packages set as a dependency of this meta package?
2. What is the rationale behind bundling everything in a way that makes it so difficult to uninstall individual applications? Couldn't they have made everything optional dependencies?
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You need to read up on the sources available to you, you need to do some research, anyways.
If you read up on pacman, you can see that Pacman allows you to do three things: .
1. allows you to remove packages without removing it's dependencies .
2. allows you to reinstall dependency packages, and marking them as explicitly installed so they are no longer marked as dependencies.
3. allows you to remove dependency packages even if the packages that depends on it is still in the system.
Use that information, read up on pacman and determine how you would like to proceed.
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2. What is the rationale behind bundling everything in a way that makes it so difficult to uninstall individual applications? Couldn't they have made everything optional dependencies?
That is the entire point of a meta-package. If you want to install only some of the dependencies then, well, install them.
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