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

[Lance Chen]

+1 for supporting split packages. Nice job!

Cheers,
Lance Chen

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Lukas Fleischer
<archlinux at cryptocrack.de> wrote:
> 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