[aur-dev] [AUR2] How to go about official dependencies

[eliott]

On 12/29/07, Sebastian <xilonmu at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm having a problem figuring out how to cleanly handle dependencies
> that exist in the official repositories. I have implemented tracking
> dependencies that are within AUR, but since we don't have access to the
> main site database it's hard to manage the packages that depend on
> official packages.
>
> The way the current AUR handles this seems to be by simply linking to a
> search for that package, but that requires some messy alterations the
> current AUR2 database structure. It is one of the solutions, though
> probably a last resort.

It doesn't.
You just use a defined url structure.
http://some/url?q=<pkgname>

There is no need to store the url in the database. Simply make it a
setttings.py configuration value, something like OFFSITE_DEP_URL or
some such...

> Another solution would be to have some sort of inter-process
> communication (XML, JSON, whatever) so that AUR2 could get some
> information about the official packages and store them in the database.
> This of course brings about redundancy and again it's quite ugly.

I agree. Seems a bit ugly to me too.

> The best solution would be to actually get access to the database and be
> able to easily reference those packages. If we had this access we could
> also work on improving and merging the code, since there is a lot of
> redundancy at the moment.

I don't think this is viable.
Remember, the AUR was (should continue to be) designed in such a way
that it could be run by someone not on the arch server. Direct
database access to the main arch repository would be a huge step in
the wrong direction for this, in my opinion.

> Here's the schema for the package, category and repository relations, in
> case you'd like more insight into the database structure. As you will see
> it would be a little difficult to make a record with just the URL
> pointing to a search on the main site.

{% for dep in pkg.deps %}
<a href="http://archlinux.org/packages/search/?q={{ dep }}">{{ dep }}</a><br />
{% endfor %}

or whatever..

The main site search functionality returns the details page if there
is a single match. This isn't quite "optimal", as for packages like
vim, it will return a list.

A better solution may be to add an additional search argument to the
search page, such that 'exact' matches are only attempted instead. eg
a seach on vim would only return details on the vim package itself,
instead of a list of packages with "vim" in the name.