[feature-request] --note support

[gandalfs-cat]

it would be very handy to be able to add notes to packages during a transaction to serve as a sort of freeform install-reason. an implementation for pacman/alpm was written a few years ago but never merged. here is how the cli was designed:

This adds --note for -S -U -D and --rmnote for -D

--note
	Add an install note to packages. This will only apply to targets explicitly
	listed and not their dependencies. The note can be used to keep track of why
	a package was installed or any other info of note. The note can later be
	edited or removed with --D --note or --D --rmnote respectively.

if there's interest in having this for aura i'd be happy to try making a PR :3

[fosskers]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion.

This has been requested before here: https://github.com/fosskers/aura/issues/670

At the time I decided not to implement it, as Aura doesn't have its own database separate from the ALPM one, so there's really nowhere to store such information in a first-class way.

[gandalfs-cat]

ah, that makes sense.. what about a feature for creating metapackages on the fly, similar to this script?

how this could look:

% aura -S js-beautify -m gandalfs_cat-doom-emacs-web-deps
...
% pactree -r js-beautify
js-beautify
└─gandalfs_cat-doom-emacs-web-deps

for more detailed management there could be subcommand, something like

aura meta, -M, --meta <PKGNAME> [options]
options:
 -a, --add-deps <package(s)>
 -g, --add-groups <group(s)>
 -d, --description <pkgdesc>
 -u, --url <url>
 --print-pkgbuild
...

and the convenience option on -S could maybe accept a description as well, something like aura -S <package(s)> --meta <metapkg>[:<metapkg-description>] could be equivalent to aura meta <metapkg> --add-deps <package(s)> --description <metapkg-description>

worth noting also that the makepkg-meta script also adds the metapackages it creates to the meta group, which makes querying them straightforward with aura -Qg meta and could be a way to implement some sanity checking to handle name collisions more gracefully than makepkg-meta currently does.