2007/6/26, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com>:
On 5/17/07, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych@gmail.com> wrote:
2007/4/23, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>:
I may be missing some history here, but I am wondering why the package metadata is in a different format than the DB metadata.
As far as parsing goes, it would be ideal to unify the two formats.
Does anyone (judd, you're CC'd on this) know any reason to keep two different formats, or any tools that would be negatively impacted by such a change? Please note, a "negative impact" is not that same as "we have to change it for the new format" - more along the lines of "we can no longer do XYZ".
Status? I don't know any reason to keep them different.
This died a LONG way back. But I have something relevant here, courtesy of Chantry: http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2006-March/005702.html
I'm all in favor of doing this, although it is going to break some things. We will need to plan a transition roadmap, especially if we want to get the local DB in the same format.
+10 for that new format! (IIRC it was mentioned at least once after that date too) I see two possibilities: 1) leave the current code for handling directory-based database during the transition period, 2) modify it to do a conversion to a new format when unpacking .db.tar.gz or finding existing unpacked database in old format. .db.tar.gz could be kept in current format for a while, to allow people who upgrade rarely to avoid problem. Or we can start using new format quickly, but leave pacman/{desc,depends} in a db, which will be parsed by old pacman, but not a new one. This will allow users to upgrade pacman first, then all other updates can be fetched by a new pacman. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)