[pacman-dev] [PATCH] pacman-lib and libarchive integration instead of libtar

[Aurelien Foret]

Christian Hamar wrote:
> Hello there.
> 
> As we talked about with Judd on irc, that should be nice to drop libtar
> fully and use libarchive instead of libtar. First
> 
> 1. libtar is obsolote and not activly developed.
> 2. libtar got many limits, which isn't good in future
> 
> About libarchive:
> 1. libarchive activly developed project
> (http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/)
> 2. libarchive supports many compression formats. Eg.: targz, tarbz2,
> zip, etc..
> 3. Better documentation available for it.
> 4. It got shared and static library too. 
> 
> We are using a patched pacman in frugalware which utilizes libarchive,
> and we are using a mixed package compression type. (Eg.: We got bz2
> compressed and gzip compressed packages too)
> 
> At us the pacman libarchive patch was fully backward compatible with old
> pacman. No package changes or recompile was needed.
> 
> My first libarchive patch is about to use libarchive in pacman-lib cvs
> instead of libtar. The mixed enviroment works at us, because we got
> a .fpm extension for packages, but in arch you got .tar.gz and i think
> need a little experimence to find out how can we integrate mixed
> packages into archlinux. (if it is needed)
> 
> The patch is attached against latest CVS.
> 
> (Oops. in this patch you can find a fix for Makefile.am which is in
> scripts/ dir. (Added pacman-optimize to makefile.am)
> 

The idea looks really nice, and I certainly don't mind to see libarchive 
replacing libtar, but IMHO, it is not the right moment to do so.
My point is that there are still lots of things to be achieved before 
releasing the library, and adding new features to it is certainly not 
the priority right now.

> I can not test this patch, (just only it is compile fine) originaly was
> rewritten of our pacman patch (frugalware) so please test it with
> archlinux. Test everything. The backward compatibility, etc.. I can not
> test it, because in frugalware we got "tons" of specific patches for
> pacman.
> 
> I'm waiting for you answer.

There are enough backward compatibility tests between pacman 2.9 and the 
library to be performed as it is for the time being...
--
Aurelien