As a rather wild aside here... what would be the downside of sticking the entire PKGBUILD in the pacman DB? How much size would that add?
Wont make that much sense (as it is not easily parsable and without patches etc. quite useless) However for community/ core/ extra/ kde-unstable/ local/ testing/ it is (gzip compressed) 1,1M
But you're just kidding, right?
Not exactly - I'm half serious. I mean, a) it'd give us all the information needed to build the package, b) it'd allow these scripts to work without an ABS tree.
I'm not saying pacman would _use_ it, I just think it'd be kinda neat.
Did anyone consider the idea that I mentioned in my previous reply? A quick recap: 1) Don't change sync and local databases. 2) Add a new database, possibly named "abs" (/var/lib/pacman/abs) 3) Create an archive for each package that contains the files in the current abs tree: -- PKGBUILD -- local source files 4) Create an abs database archive similar to the current sync db archive that contains a file (or more) with information from the parsed PKGBUILD, e.g.: %NAME% foo %VERSION% 2.3 %DEPENDS% bar baz %MAKEDEPENDS% this that something else %SOURCES% foo-2.3.tar.gz example.patch foo.png etc 5) Distribute this abs repo on the servers alongside the other repos. The user would then sync the abs database (which would only contain small files with the PKGBUILD info, so it wouldn't take much space) and be able to download packages containing everything needed to build from source The user would have the choice of installing the abs database and would only download PKGBUILDs & local source files for what they actually intend to build, unlike the current abs tree which dumps everything on the users system (wasted bandwidth, wasted space). It would also be non-Arch specific.