Miklos Vajna wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:33:18PM -0500, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
3. Scrap the whole libalpm/split idea. Whoa! I know you are thinking "but that would be a step backwards!". Would it? I can tell you this- the pacman 2.9.8 codebase was about half the size of the current monster, and we have a lot of crazy design issues going on. Instead of trying to write a pacman library, why not just implement a friendly frontend, command-line interface, which is a bit more Unix-y? For example, monotone has its "automate" command (I haven't looked at this in some time, so let me know if I am wrong) that is designed to be used by other clients as machine-parseable. git is based around this concept as well- look at all the low level tools like rev-parse, etc.
there are other good examples, like git, darcs or mplayer's slave mode, where the interface is script-friendly, so (almost) nobody claims for a library.
Well, maybe if pacman was really designed with this in mind, I would find it less ugly indeed.
4. Switch to something like python. I'm resistant to this idea. Although I think scripting languages like this have great benefits, I don't think pacman needs most of them. Having a package manager that always works is important to me, and part of me just thinks a low-level compiled language is the right thing for a system tool.
exactly. you probably heard of the poor gentoo guys who broke their python, losing their package manager as well :P
That's true, but hmm.. Even though I don't know python well, it seems many programmers like it and are efficient with it, so it would probably be more practical from that point of view.