[aur-general] [HEADS-UP] Meta data and split package support in the AUR

[Lukas Fleischer]

Hello,

I plan to do the next major AUR release by late May or June and I
thought this might be a good time to let people know what is going on
behind the scenes.

AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These
metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the
source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which
can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you
don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.

Having this information available means that:

1. We can drop the PKGBUILD parser from the AUR. The parser will still
   be available in the upcoming release but it will be marked as
   deprecated and a warning will be displayed whenever someone tries to
   upload a source tarball without metadata.

2. We can implement other things that were blocked by the AUR PKGBUILD
   parser being incomplete and inaccurate. Specifically, the next
   release will support split packages.

Things that are on our TODO list:

* Test the new AUR code. The split package code is still experimental.
* Fix and extend the AUR RPC interface.
* Test Dave's pkgbuild-introspection.
* Move pkgbuild-introspection (or at least mkaurball) to [community].

It would also be nice to get metadata generation integrated into makepkg
so that people no longer need to install mkaurball to generate source
tarballs for the AUR.

Regards,
Lukas

[1] https://github.com/falconindy/pkgbuild-introspection