[arch-dev-public] [idea] global link database for all packages

[Pierre Schmitz]

Hi,

I just got an idea which might be worth to think about. Namcap is quite useful 
but due to its limitation of only seeing a certain pkg file at a time it 
cannot answer all questions.

The idea is to create a database (similar to the file list we already create) 
which includes lists of files and to which they are linked. Dumping this 
togehter with our pkgdb and file lists in a hughe SQL db we can answer 
questions such as:

* What are the hidden deps of a package?
* Which pacakge need a rebuld if I bump a certain package?
* Find missing deps
* What happens if I remove a dep from a package?
** e.g. if I remove openssl as dep for Qt I need to review every package that
   directly or indirectly depends on Qt and check if it needs openssl (which
   was hidden by the Qt dep before)
* Maybe check for so name conflicts or packages providing the same one?
  (libgl, java)
* check a package deps without the need to actually install its deps. (like
  namcap)

I made a quick and dirty script based on the createFileLists script: 
http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre/tmp/createLinkLists.txt

It should work fine and even incremental but its runtime is awful. So, if you 
think that might be a good idea there is a lot of room for improvements. I 
don't know if its possible with bash but we don't really need to extract every 
file:
* check if a file is an elf file
* extract the header
* move to next file

-- 

Pierre Schmitz, http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre