[aur-general] determining inverse AUR dependencies of binary packages

[Loui Chang]

On Wed 10 Nov 2010 14:05 +0000, Christopher Brannon wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'll start this discussion with an example of the problem.
> 
> I notice that python-sqlalchemy is about to change in [community].
> Most of the packages which depend on it will need to change their
> dependency to python2-sqlalchemy.  This is handled quite nicely for
> packages in the binary repositories.  If you do a package search on
> www.archlinux.org, you'll see which packages require python-sqlalchemy.
> Likewise, it is easy to get a list of [unsupported] packages which
> require a given package from [unsupported].  However, I don't know of a
> way to get a list of [unsupported] packages which require a given
> package from the binary repositories.  If it were possible to build such
> lists, we could contact maintainers of [unsupported] packages, in order
> to inform them of upcoming changes which require their attention.

There is somewhat of a system in place to track dependencies in the AUR.
The AUR creates a hidden dummy packages for dependencies that haven't
already been uploaded. Work needs to be done to make that system more
reliable and accessible though.

Here's an example of a dummy package:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23600