[aur-general] 'provides' info in AUR

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Sam S. <smls75 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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... :(
>
> ---
> [1] http://dev.gentoo.org/~qiaomuf/libbash.html

I love the fact someone could be working on a bash parser but that
solution is *insane*.

This is a solved problem: use a metafile compiled by whatever tools
you use in your distro/domain that can be parsed safely and easily.
For Arch, those are PKGINFOs.

Good point on the differences per arch. I guess the obvious solution
that comes to mind here is to have makepkg -S generate the source
files for each arch value (eg. PKGINFO.x86_64, etc) but that's not
necessarily good and is the subject of another discussion imo.