[aur-dev] AUR2 API

[Sebastian Nowicki]

Hi,

I sent a similar mail over a year ago with no response, but this time  
I wrote up a draft on the wiki[1]. I'd like some suggestions and  
general feedback about the API, particularly from AUR client  
developers. I know there was some progress made on an API for the  
current AUR, but I can't find any end-user documentation for it. Is it  
finished? If the current interface is nice, there's no point re- 
designing it. It would be better to maintain compatibility if API  
clients already exist.

As noted in the wiki, I think a well designed API is vital. This would  
allow a lot of neat tools for managing packages (uploading, updating,  
TU management) and easier integration with the makepkg/pacman  
toolchain for installing packages. It is quite possibly more important  
than the website itself.

It occurred to me that we could eliminate the /api/ url part, and use  
the same URLs for various resources, but simply use different content  
types[2] to return HTML or JSON/XML/YAML/etc. I.e., we could have http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.html 
, which shows the normal HTML page users would see, but if we change  
to http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.json, we get only the data in  
JSON format. If the extension is not supplied, it could default to the  
html output. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but it would  
make sense, since the business logic is identical, only the output  
differs.

[1]: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_2#Draft
[2]: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_2#Content_Types