[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Allow package to display a brief message before sync install

[Loui Chang]

On Tue 15 Sep 2009 21:18 +1000, James Rayner wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:14 PM, James Rayner <iphitus at iphitus.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I don't really know what to think here. I had looked at that messages
> >> one for a long time and thought it was a decent idea, but never went
> >> far enough to take it and run with it.
> >>
> >> @Loui- sure, but this is for extraordinary messages- a lot more
> >> exclusive than ChangeLog-worthy stuff, and you have to explicitly
> >> request to see that anyway.
> >>
> >> @Jeff- it isn't exactly straightforward to view an install script
> >> beforehand, and the post_install business is a rather hacky reason for
> >> needing an install script.
> >>
> >> -Dan
> >>
> >
> > Dan's got the idea...
> >
> > pacman should not break someone's system without at least telling them
> > first. So yes - this is intended for more extraordinary messages.
> >
> > The current ways of informing the user (homepage/forum news and
> > post-install) are broken and non-simple:
> >  - both polling based
> oh, and post-install is after the fact - when the system is broken, so
> it's not a very good way of informing the user that their system "will
> break" because it's already broken.
>
> Anyway, I'm all for a more generalised/ideal setup, but that's been
> wanted for a while with no patches coming forward.

The user should be made aware that there is a ChangeLog, and they have a
means of easily reading that before installation or upgrade.

There's no need to bloat makepkg, PKGBUILDs, and pacman.
You only need to add a little to pacman like this.