[aur-dev] PKGBUILD parsing on the AUR

[Gergely Imreh]

2009/8/3 Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>

I don't think there was any doubt about that. It would be pretty
useless otherwise... :)
  Greg