[pacman-dev] do we need requiredby?

[Nagy Gabor]

> On Nov 14, 2007 6:08 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We (anyone want to volunteer) also need to make a tool to remove
> > requiredby entries.
> 
> I was going to python it up... it's an easy file to parse and rewrite,
> probably like 20 lines
> 
> > I took an initial stab at it using libalpm, then I
> > realized we have no explicit mechanism to tell the backend to write to
> > the DB. Does this sound like something we should expose, or is it too
> > low level?
> 
> I'd say no. There's a reason why we don't have mutators for package
> structures (front ends shouldn't be modifying that data).
If you implement this with care (don't let the front-end corrupt the db), this
is acceptable for me. Personally, sometimes I modify my localdb by hand (mostly
%REASON%), which is much more dangerous than a well controlled
localdb->pmpkg_t...edit...pmpkg_t->localdb process.
After we removed %REQUIREDBY%, %REASON% is the only reason in my mind where this
can be useful [so I revert this:
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-November/010066.html] See
also: http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-September/009302.html
I know your answer: reinstall the package... This is needless, and now the
REASON handling is chaotic, probably I must do -Rd, -S if I want to set a
dependency reason to explicit [<- so as a brother of --asdep, --asexplicit can
be useful too], which is ugly.
Bye, ngaba


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