[aur-dev] PKGBUILD parsing on the AUR

[Loui Chang]

On Sun 02 Aug 2009 18:43 +0200, Xyne wrote:
> I suspected that it was scraping the PKGBUILDs due to discrepancies
> reported on the bug tracker (valid PKGBUILDs not being properly parsed
> on the AUR, etc).
> 
> There is no fully functional solution to extracting data from bash
> PKGBUILDs. Sourcing it exposes you to malicious code and implementing a
> full interpreter would do the same (as it would have to handle command
> outputs, which in turn means running commands). Anything less will not
> be able to fully parse all valid PKGBUILDs. That's why I've been
> playing around with the idea of a non-bash PKGBUILD [1]. The AUR would
> definitely benefit from this as would any application which interacts
> with it. It would be nice to accurately resolve dependency trees using
> only the JSON-RPC interface, for example.
> 
> Where can I view the code for the web pages?
> 
> [1] http://xyne.archlinux.ca/ideas/pkgmeta

I'd like to note that a non-bash PKGBUILD won't be supported by the AUR
unless it gets official support via pacman/makepkg.