On 2/1/19 4:04 PM, Dávid Bíró wrote:
Dear Pacman Devs
I want to add a parallel download feature for Pacman. Is it a wanted feature? Should I do it? If yes, could you provide some docs for the code?
We have a feature request for this at https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20056 We're definitely interested in adding it, but no one has yet come forth with both the time and interest in doing so, and actually implemented it. There have been a couple of initial attempts which never went anywhere... So if you can develop a solution that does this well, it will most likely be merged. :) In the interest of ensuring that your efforts are directed in productive directions, I encourage you to read the feature request ticket, and to take note of the following requirement: Quoting Allan (the lead developer) there:
The primary target for development in terms of download is the internal (libcurl) downloader. I will not consider patches for implementing multiple transfers via XferCommand until it is implemented in the internal downloader. The implementation for both will overlap somewhat and maintaining support for non-basic features of the external downloader will never take precedence over implementing new features for the internal downloader. So I prefer not to implement a feature that we may deliberately break and remove in the future.
Also note that the solution would need to be compatible with more than just Arch Linux -- e.g. the Windows MSYS2 framework is a significant downstream user of pacman. ... On the topic of docs, pacman does have a doxygen target, although you should be warned that it is still a work in progress. I currently host, for convenience, prebuilt versions of the docs at https://pkgbuild.com/~eschwartz/pacman-docs/ in both html and section 3 manpage format. -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User