A nice feature for pacman

sud_crow · 2004-04-22 07:55:41

I dont think im the only one that does a weekly "pacman -Syu", many do it more often i guess, but i cant allow that, so i do it once a week, now i dont have that many pkgs as i've been really busy and just reinstalled Arch a week or so ago, but i do had this thought before i reinstalled:

When i had my prior system, i had lots of packages, and sometimes i didnt want to update them all at the same night (yeah you guessed, dialup), so i had to "manually" see what where the ones i wanted more.

Now, here is the issue, "pacman -Syu" is a list of all the pkgs available for update with no particular order except for the abecedary, so some pkgs starting with "k" would be mixed with the KDE ones and the same for the "G" and Gnome, and all this made a lot more complicated to choose what packages to upgrade. So i was thinking, cant the output of "pacman -Syu" be categorized? as with the categories the Arch installer use?

I think an ordered list of the packages available would be a much nicer thing to see and very usufull too.

Hope you take it in consideration.
Regrets.

apeiro · 2004-04-22 17:34:08

The list is ordered first alphabetically, then re-ordered based on dependencies. So if kdelibs requires qt, qt will show up in the list before kdelibs.

As for categorization, that currently can't be done. The categories are only there for organization within ABS and the website, and during installation. Pacman has no knowledge of categories whatsoever.

It would be problematic to start doing partial sysupgrades. You might miss a key dependency and break packages.

Dusty · 2004-04-22 20:16:59

I'm on dialup too, and I also tend to selectively upgrade stuff. One option would be to start an Syu and just not finish it, but its more interesting to upgrade packages that make sense first. For example, its mor interesting to upgrade gimp than something that starts with "lib". :-D

I think that if you Sy an individual package, pacman should automatically upgrade any packages that new package depends on (and are out of date) before upgrading that package. That *should* solve problems with dependencies, shouldn't it?

Dusty

kakabaratruskia · 2004-04-22 21:40:19

maybe, there could be an option for pacman, that when you do -Syu, you where asked if you want to install each package. (like download foo? (Y/N), download dasda?(Y/N), etc.)

sud_crow · 2004-04-23 04:53:56

apeiro wrote:

It would be problematic to start doing partial sysupgrades. You might miss a key dependency and break packages.

Hi,

I wasnt thinking in doing partial sysupgrades, i think you didnt understood what i wanted to say (im sorry but when i read something written by me in english a couple of hours ago, i find several errors on my ways of expression, not to name grammatical and ortographical).

What i meant, was that if there is a way of ordering the "display" of the output of pacman -Syu in categories, so one can see in more detail for a pkg that might want to update if there is actually any update to do.

Instead of:

abiword-1.2-pkg.tar.gz gcc-3.4-pkg.tar.gz libbonoboui-2.3-pkg.tar.gz xfree86-4.4-pkg.tar.gz xmms-2-10.pkg.tar.gz ... [...]

It would be something like this:

Base:
gcc-3.4-pkg.tar.gz ... [...]

Office:
abiword-1.2-pkg.tar.gz ... [...]

Multimedia:
xmms-2.10.pkg.tar.gz ... [...]

X:
xfree86-4.4-pkg.tar.gz ... [...]

The numbers in the versions are random except on the ones i remembered current ones.

About missing key dependencies, i do pacman -Syu to see what are the pkgs updated, then choose NO at the do system upgrade question and then i do a pacman -S [app1] [app2] [app3].... and pacman deals with the dependencies, so i dont think we would have any problem with them... is this what you meant??

kakabaratruskia wrote:

maybe, there could be an option for pacman, that when you do -Syu, you where asked if you want to install each package. (like download foo? (Y/N), download dasda?(Y/N), etc.)

I think this is a great idea, it would help a lot (i wouldnt have to do the last step in the previous paragraph )
Something like pacman -Syu --ask

Anyway, this are just thoughts!

Regards

Arch Linux

#1 2004-04-22 07:55:41

A nice feature for pacman

#2 2004-04-22 17:34:08

Re: A nice feature for pacman

#3 2004-04-22 20:16:59

Re: A nice feature for pacman

#4 2004-04-22 21:40:19

Re: A nice feature for pacman

#5 2004-04-23 04:53:56

Re: A nice feature for pacman

Board footer