[aur-general] [HEADS-UP] Meta data and split package support in the AUR
Hello, I plan to do the next major AUR release by late May or June and I thought this might be a good time to let people know what is going on behind the scenes. AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you don't need to worry about creating this file on your own. Having this information available means that: 1. We can drop the PKGBUILD parser from the AUR. The parser will still be available in the upcoming release but it will be marked as deprecated and a warning will be displayed whenever someone tries to upload a source tarball without metadata. 2. We can implement other things that were blocked by the AUR PKGBUILD parser being incomplete and inaccurate. Specifically, the next release will support split packages. Things that are on our TODO list: * Test the new AUR code. The split package code is still experimental. * Fix and extend the AUR RPC interface. * Test Dave's pkgbuild-introspection. * Move pkgbuild-introspection (or at least mkaurball) to [community]. It would also be nice to get metadata generation integrated into makepkg so that people no longer need to install mkaurball to generate source tarballs for the AUR. Regards, Lukas [1] https://github.com/falconindy/pkgbuild-introspection
On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux@cryptocrack.de> wrote:
Hello,
I plan to do the next major AUR release by late May or June and I thought this might be a good time to let people know what is going on behind the scenes.
AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.
Having this information available means that:
1. We can drop the PKGBUILD parser from the AUR. The parser will still be available in the upcoming release but it will be marked as deprecated and a warning will be displayed whenever someone tries to upload a source tarball without metadata.
2. We can implement other things that were blocked by the AUR PKGBUILD parser being incomplete and inaccurate. Specifically, the next release will support split packages.
Things that are on our TODO list:
* Test the new AUR code. The split package code is still experimental. * Fix and extend the AUR RPC interface. * Test Dave's pkgbuild-introspection. * Move pkgbuild-introspection (or at least mkaurball) to [community].
It would also be nice to get metadata generation integrated into makepkg so that people no longer need to install mkaurball to generate source tarballs for the AUR.
Regards, Lukas
Cool :-) Can you please send this to aur-dev too?
On Sat, 05 Apr 2014 at 23:05:41, Karol Blazewicz wrote:
[...] Can you please send this to aur-dev too?
Yes, I already did that [1]. [1] https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-dev/2014-April/002690.html
+1 for supporting split packages. Nice job! Cheers, Lance Chen On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux@cryptocrack.de> wrote:
Hello,
I plan to do the next major AUR release by late May or June and I thought this might be a good time to let people know what is going on behind the scenes.
AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.
Having this information available means that:
1. We can drop the PKGBUILD parser from the AUR. The parser will still be available in the upcoming release but it will be marked as deprecated and a warning will be displayed whenever someone tries to upload a source tarball without metadata.
2. We can implement other things that were blocked by the AUR PKGBUILD parser being incomplete and inaccurate. Specifically, the next release will support split packages.
Things that are on our TODO list:
* Test the new AUR code. The split package code is still experimental. * Fix and extend the AUR RPC interface. * Test Dave's pkgbuild-introspection. * Move pkgbuild-introspection (or at least mkaurball) to [community].
It would also be nice to get metadata generation integrated into makepkg so that people no longer need to install mkaurball to generate source tarballs for the AUR.
Regards, Lukas
Am 05.04.2014 14:38, schrieb Lukas Fleischer:
AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.
What is the reason that such metadata cannot be generated with `makepkg --source`? We would need to call it .METAINFO or so instead of .AURINFO, but otherwise I don't see why we need yet another tool for it.
On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 at 12:37:19, Thomas Bächler wrote:
Am 05.04.2014 14:38, schrieb Lukas Fleischer:
AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.
What is the reason that such metadata cannot be generated with `makepkg --source`? We would need to call it .METAINFO or so instead of .AURINFO, but otherwise I don't see why we need yet another tool for it.
As I wrote in the original email, it is one of our goals to get this feature integrated into makepkg(8). It hasn't been implemented in makepkg from day one since pacman requires the format to be very general and cover a lot of corner cases. As no one was interested to implement this with all its subtleties all at once, our idea was to develop a format gradually. The very first implementation (which has been supported by the AUR for a couple of months) only supported very few fields, with zero support for split packages. Dave extended this format and I implemented the required changes in the AUR backend. It should not be too much work to merge Dave's tool into makepkg and rename the file once it is mature enough; in the meantime, the AUR will serve as a testbed for both the format and the implementation.
On Sat, 05 Apr 2014 at 14:38:44, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
[...] 1. We can drop the PKGBUILD parser from the AUR. The parser will still be available in the upcoming release but it will be marked as deprecated and a warning will be displayed whenever someone tries to upload a source tarball without metadata.
Note that this will happen in the next release which will be tagged next week. So if anyone is still using the old PKGBUILD parser, please switch to using .AURINFO now.
2. We can implement other things that were blocked by the AUR PKGBUILD parser being incomplete and inaccurate. Specifically, the next release will support split packages.
Things that are on our TODO list:
* Test the new AUR code. The split package code is still experimental. * Fix and extend the AUR RPC interface. * Test Dave's pkgbuild-introspection. * Move pkgbuild-introspection (or at least mkaurball) to [community].
It would also be nice to get metadata generation integrated into makepkg so that people no longer need to install mkaurball to generate source tarballs for the AUR.
Regards, Lukas
participants (4)
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Karol Blazewicz
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Lance Chen
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Lukas Fleischer
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Thomas Bächler