[aur-dev] pkgbase queries via RPC interface

[Colin Woodbury]

And for helpers to have to redownload that that frequently would be a pain.
Would it update when a new package was uploaded or changed?


On 16 August 2014 07:52, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux at cryptocrack.de> wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 at 05:25:12, Xyne wrote:
> > [...]
> > That works for me. In that case, the method should accept a list of
> fields to
> > search (pkgname, pkgbase, pkgdesc, maintainer, deps, url?, etc.). There
> should
> > be a way to search for exact matches (e.g. to retrieve data about a
> specific
> > package or package base). That could be done either with regexes (too
> much
> > server overhead?) or an extra parameter that forces a perfect match.
> >
> > The returned objects should include a "type" field to specify what kind
> of
> > object they are ("package", "package base").
> >
> > A filter to reduce the returned fields may be useful in some cases but
> it's
> > easy enough to filter on the client-side. I suppose it's a matter of cpu
> vs
> > bandwidth for the server.
> > [...]
> > I'm not sure what the best way to build in boolean logic would be
> ("and", "or",
> > "xor"?, etc.) or if it is even something that you would want to
> implement.
> > Maybe with a custom "advanced" parameter that accepts a string that the
> server
> > can parse directly (using some existing syntax?).
> >
> >
> > I'm just kicking around some ideas for the sake of discussion.
> >
>
> I'd rather not overcomplicate things. Having a "by" parameter, the
> possibility to pass one or multiple (fixed) strings and an option to
> enable exact matching is what I was thinking of. I do not think that
> combining search types gives a substantial benefit.
>
> If we really need to support very powerful queries, it might be better
> to reconsider another idea I had earlier: Replace the RPC interface with
> a static database. Basically, the result of an RPC query that matches
> every single package is computed every hour (or so) and stored in a flat
> file which can be downloaded, similar to pacman databases. AUR helpers
> can download that file and do whatever they want. Note that this file
> will probably be quite large, though (roughly 5-10MiB when compressed,
> did not check with the latest set of packages). I am not sure whether
> this is the best thing to do, since, unlike in the case of the official
> repositories, users are usually only interested in a tiny amount of AUR
> packages.
>