[aur-general] 'provides' info in AUR

[Sam S.]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't understand why makepkg -S
> doesn't include the .PKGINFO file from makepkg (and subsequently the
> AUR would use that if present instead of the grep system which fails
> as soon as variables/expansions are involved which is every other
> package). All the implementation is there.
>

It would probably be better then what we have now, but a perfect solution
would also account for PKGBUILDs that use Bash conditionals to set
different variables on i386 systems than on x86_64 systems (which is pretty
common among AUR packages that package upstream binaries rather than
compiling from source).

Reading values from .PKGINFO would populate the AUR with the values for
whichever architecture the package uploader happened to use. (So if the
maintainer changes, or the same maintainer works on different computers, a
simple re-upload of an AUR package could suddenly change the package's
meta-info, i.e. the AUR would become more "fragile".)

Of course, the "perfect solution" would be pretty difficult to implement.
Gentoo had a GSoC project last year [1], to implement an efficient and safe
(side-effect free) limited Bash parser / pseudo-interpreter in C++,
sufficient to extract all necessary values from Genoo's equivalent of
PKGBUILDs. Surely, this could have been useful for the AUR as well. But I
can find no evidence of continued project activity after the GSoC period
ended, so it appears they have given up... :(

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[1] http://dev.gentoo.org/~qiaomuf/libbash.html