[aur-dev] pkgbase queries via RPC interface

[Xyne]

On 2014-08-16 16:52 +0200
Lukas Fleischer wrote:

>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.

The advantage of real-time results is that they can be used to confirm uploads
and other operations. Making a compressed database available may be useful in
its own right but I would not want to see it replace the current system.

Given that the current search already searches by both name and description,
would a single "by" parameter be able to at least accept a character-delimited
list to search multiple fields (e.g. pkgname:pkgbase:pkgdesc)? If not, what
about accepting multiple "by"s for a combined OR search?