Leonid Isaev <lisaev@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:37 -0400 > Jeremiah Dodds <jeremiah.dodds@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> >> Sorry if this is dragging up an old topic, but I've been poking around >> AIF as I'm interested in possibly (hopefully) bringing it up to speed >> and/or improving it, and I noticed that it's still in the repos, but >> isn't installable by anyone who doesn't happen to have grub legacy still >> installed on their system, unless I'm missing something. > > This looks like a packaging bug which is rather general: a package in [extra] > depends on a package from [community] or [aur]. AIF is one example, ruby is > another... Right, it's definitely a general issue. > Regarding AIF/grub, you could file a bug to either (a) move AIF to AUR, or (b) > make grub-bios provide grub. > In this particular case, AIF *really* does depend on grub. I'm working on that though. I just noticed that it was available for install from extra still, and that got me thinking about repository consistency. >> >> It seems like we'd want to avoid having to manually remove packages >> every time it becomes impossible to install a set of them. This might be >> my unfamiliarity with libalpm or pacman or any other myriad part of the >> stack, but it seems like the type of thing that could be handled by a >> utlity and a cron job fairly easily. >> >> It also seems like the type of thing that wouldn't be too annoying to >> deal with manually at the moment, but that could get frustrating for >> both users and devs down the line. Menial maintanence tasks like that[1] >> tend to end up sucking down a lot of people's time and energy in the >> long run, in my experience. >> >> If the lack of an automated "dead package remover" is just a "lack of >> time / patches welcome" type of thing, I'd volunteer to take a crack at >> writing the thing. If it isn't, I'd really like to know why. > > By 'dead' you mean a package no longer available in the official repos? I > would be for such tool provided I could disable it. For example, I still have > grub-legacy and don't care to migrate to grub2, so I don't want pacman to > remove my grub1. > By 'dead' I mean a package that depends on things in the repos that are no longer there. I was thinking of something that would be detecting these in the repo and removing their availability purely on the server-side so they didn't show up in -Ss, (or even just marking them in some way), not anything touching installed packages on the end of a user running pacman. At the very most, I'd propose having pacman warn the user about the situation so they knew about it, that's about it. -- Jeremiah Dodds github: https://github.com/jdodds irc : exhortatory
