On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 12:56:47AM -0400, Travis Willard wrote:
One area I can see much improvement in is configuration. I've noticed, poking around the code, that parsing the configuration file and applying the configuration once parsed is all left up to the front-end. Why is this?
Looking at pacman.conf, the single configuration option that's front-end-specific would be ILoveCandy. Everything else - repo locations, holdpkg, ignorepkg, noextract, and so on - seem to be options that users would want to persist no matter what front-end they're using. If they launch the command-line pacman, or a KDE front-end, or a Gnome front-end, the repos, ignored packages, held packages, and so on should all be the same - in 99% of the cases, I'd be willing to be the user would expect pacman to fetch from the same repos no matter which front-end they used, for example. This means that every front-end will be parsing the same configuration files, using their own code to do so, and will be re-inventing the wheel many times over.
That's .. interesting :) http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-June/008645.html
Another improvement in the config area would be a better way to specify repositories. This has been brought up before - there's a lot of copied info between the files in /etc/pacman.d and it can be annoying to need to change 3-4 files if you want to change your mirror. While I'm not sure of how the syntax would look, specifying a base URL for the mirror combined with which repos that mirror contains would probably be the best bet.
Anyway, there's my two cents.
Did you have a look at pacman 3.1 ? There is just one file left, but not sure if it's done the way you wanted : http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-July/008941.html