[arch-projects] Pluggable wrapper

[Jason Chu]

There are two conflicting schools of thought with respect to adding
features to pacman:
- everything should be written into pacman, because there's less to worry
about that way
- everything should be a wrapper, because it complicates pacman less

For the most part, I believe the latter.  There are some things that would
benefit everyone if they were added to pacman, but most things would just
add unnecessary complexity that's only used by a subset of all the users.

There is a related issue to wrappers though: if you have more than one
wrapper that do complimentary things, shouldn't you be able to run both of
them at the same time?

Enter the pluggable wrapper script.  It would be event based, interfacing
(almost) seamlessly with pacman, and allow you to enabled and disable wrapper
functionality, such as srcpac.

My two example cases were srcpac and rollbacks.  Rollbacks could be
implementable through such a system, but I'm already told it'll be going
right into pacman itself.  Another example is regular expression searching.

What does everyone think of this idea?  Is there enough demand for
different functionalities that would be nice for some people but annoying,
problematic or just stupid to add to pacman?

Jason

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