2007/6/28, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com>:
I know Andrew just had a commit dealing with a very similar thing in the xdelta creation in makepkg, and he removed the dependency on a package having a certain name. This is the same sort of issue, and I think it would be wise for us to fix it everywhere we can. Not only does this free us up from the CARCH issue, note the amount of code we can remove because of it. (For a side note- I challenge anyone to start submitting patches to the list that result in a net removal rather than addition of code. They are a lot more helpful than you would think.)
Isn't this only a temporary problem, due to the addeda arch suffix in pacman 2 -> pacman 3 transition ? If so, can't we just drop the old package scheme at some point, and parsing will then be easier (just like before).
Does anyone have concerns with this, and does anyone have some great ideas how to (re)implement partial cache cleaning functionality correctly? The old way wasn't phenomenal, and I just got rid of it in this first commit here. There were also many shortcomings in it as you can see in the comments throughout that section.
I didn't really look into it (already so many things to look at ;)) but I'm just curious, what were the main problems this code had ? Anyway, I'm afraid it can't be just dropped without being reimplemented, because I believe many users use that. (not me though) Or maybe it should be asked how badly this feature is needed / used.