[arch-dev-public] Files database, potential changes

[Dan McGee]

So right now we have our create-filelists cronjob in the dbscripts
pumping out files databases. This is great, except that the file is a
lot less useful to automated processes than you would think. If you
hadn't guessed yet, I'm trying to get this stuff back in the website.
I have it working about 90% locally but the last 10% is the key.

The problem stems from our old single-arch, no-any packages mentality.
The files DB simply doesn't have enough information to match up a
*complete* package specification with its files due to these busted
assumptions. Although we can parse the pkgname and pkgver from the
directory names in the zip, we have no idea what is an 'any' package
and what is an arch-specific package. Since every package is unique on
the tuple of (pkgname, repo, arch), we are missing one of the three
components here in this database.

One thought is to actually implement the hack into create-filelists as
I currently do when parsing the files DB:

                if type == 'files' and fname == 'files':
                    # we don't have desc to provide us with name/version here,
                    # so we need to do some of the work on our own.
                    dirname = os.path.split(tarinfo.name)[0]
                    tpkg.write('%NAME%\n')
                    tpkg.write('-'.join(dirname.split('-')[:-2]))
                    tpkg.write('\n\n%VERSION%\n')
                    tpkg.write('-'.join(dirname.split('-')[-2:]))
                    tpkg.write('\n\n%ARCH%\n')
                    tpkg.write('i686\n')

These are the required attributes to get a full package spec. Does
anyone object to placing a desc file inside the files database holding
this information to make it easier for tools to work with our
multi-architecture ecosystem these days? Or if you have a better idea
than the above, I would of course be up for that as well.

-Dan