[aur-dev] Making the AUR package list more useful

[Lukas Fleischer]

Recently, there were a couple of feature requests to make the AUR
package search more powerful. While I do not plan on adding more
patterns or regular expressions to the RPC interface itself, my idea is
that more tools should be using the package name list. However, there
seem to be two issues with that:

1. The list is outdated. Right now, it is updated every two hours. I
   do not think there is a good reason for those long intervals.
   Reducing it to, say, ten minutes should be totally fine. Or maybe
   even trigger list generation whenever a package is created or deleted
   (which is clearly a lot more work, though). Thoughts?

2. Transferring the whole package name list is inefficient. Even if we
   use gzip compression here, the whole list is several hundreds of
   kilobytes large. We need to retransfer the full list, even if only a
   single package is added. Maybe we can do better than pacman here. My
   idea is to add zsync support to the lists such that only relevant
   parts are downloaded (for those who do not know: zsync is like rsync
   but it works via HTTP as well and does not require any special
   software on the server side). I did not experiment with how much
   bandwidth we can actually save using this yet. Maybe the block size
   needs to be adjusted. Are there any opinions or other suggestions on
   this topic?

Regards,
Lukas