[aur-general] non-http aur access
Hi folks, I think there should be a way to access the AUR without having to use a full featured web browser, preferably a command-line client. I suggest exposing a db (like every repository got one) and an ftp site which contains the same as http://aur.archlinux.org/packages to public use. On that way one could easily write clients that fetch the db, perform queries offline and get the tarballs via ftp. I do realize that there is yaourt, but that work-around is not exactly what I thought of. What do you think? best regards, wakeup PS: This is my first post to this list, so if that idea is not new, please excuse me. :) -- An Ashanti Proverb from Ghana - It is because of beauty, that is why the woman holds her breasts when she runs, not because the breasts are going to fall -Fela Kuti
2008/8/17 wakeup <wakeup@erehwon.de>:
Hi folks, I think there should be a way to access the AUR without having to use a full featured web browser, preferably a command-line client. I suggest exposing a db (like every repository got one) and an ftp site which contains the same as http://aur.archlinux.org/packages to public use. On that way one could easily write clients that fetch the db, perform queries offline and get the tarballs via ftp. I do realize that there is yaourt, but that work-around is not exactly what I thought of. What do you think?
There's already an RPC interface for the AUR: http://aur.archlinux.org/rpc.php You can always write a script which fetches http://aur.archlinux.org/packages every X hours and stores the package names in a text file. Fetching tarballs is also easy -- a simple script will do the job (the tarballs are in http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/$pkgname/$pkgname.tar.gz) There's also the excellent aurvote [1] which allows you to vote for packages from the command line. It can also be extended to flag packages out of date, for example. -- Abhishek
There's also aurup for another example off how to use aur from the CLI. (Be careful though, the code makes you want to cry a bit)
Thank you for the replies first off, but I think you misunderstood me. I do realize that it is possible to write those CLI-tools with a lot of shell-hacking and excessive use of various string manipulation tools. You have to see though, that this is a pain for devs! I do not think AUR's web interface represents the Arch way (keeping it simple) good enough, because it makes writing a light client much more difficult than it has to be. Of course one can access the AUR via CLI, but it sure is not the simple way. Think of the other benefits a client/server model brings with it, like bigger scalability through mirroring (and in general) or the possibility to choose your favorite client. cheers, wakeup -- An Ashanti Proverb from Ghana - It is because of beauty, that is why the woman holds her breasts when she runs, not because the breasts are going to fall -Fela Kuti
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 10:16 PM, wakeup <wakeup@erehwon.de> wrote:
Thank you for the replies first off, but I think you misunderstood me.
I do realize that it is possible to write those CLI-tools with a lot of shell-hacking and excessive use of various string manipulation tools. You have to see though, that this is a pain for devs! I do not think AUR's web interface represents the Arch way (keeping it simple) good enough, because it makes writing a light client much more difficult than it has to be. Of course one can access the AUR via CLI, but it sure is not the simple way.
Think of the other benefits a client/server model brings with it, like bigger scalability through mirroring (and in general) or the possibility to choose your favorite client.
cheers, wakeup
I was under the impression the other replies in this thread explained this but please see this link: http://aur.archlinux.org/rpc.php This is a JSON interface for the AUR, it allows most queries possible on the web interface and is exactly what you're looking for. It provides everything you're asking with the benefit of not having to download an entire database. -- Callan Barrett
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 04:16:57PM +0200, wakeup wrote:
I do realize that it is possible to write those CLI-tools with a lot of shell-hacking and excessive use of various string manipulation tools. You have to see though, that this is a pain for devs! I do not think AUR's web interface represents the Arch way (keeping it simple) good enough, because it makes writing a light client much more difficult than it has to be. Of course one can access the AUR via CLI, but it sure is not the simple way.
Think of the other benefits a client/server model brings with it, like bigger scalability through mirroring (and in general) or the possibility to choose your favorite client.
There isn't any good full featured non web access to AUR. I'd love to see something like that, and eventually I mean to start writing a system from scratch that could replace AUR. There was a project called repoman a while back that was attempting to do something similar I think. Take a look at tupkg and tupkgs in the AUR code. I was thinking that might be useful for writing a new system. Also, this discussion might be more appropriate in aur-dev.
participants (5)
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Abhishek Dasgupta
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Callan Barrett
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Daenyth Blank
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Loui
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wakeup