[pacman-dev] My thoughts for development

[Roman Kyrylych]

2006/12/20, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> > 3. I posted a patch for #5223 (source cache) and it has been patched.
> > However, it is now a triple conditional with three different possible
> > locations for package source (current dir, $SRCDEST, and
> > /var/cache/pacman/src). Is the last one necessary since it is highly
> > recommended to not build as root? Should we deprecate this path?
> > Looking even further ahead, should we make fakeroot a requirement for
> > running makepkg?
>
> Hmmm.  Building as root _is_ actually used in one or two oddball cases
> (Judd knows what they are) so explicitly denying them may not work.
> As for the SRCDEST check... why not default SRCDEST to the pacman
> cache dir, and just check one single place for it.  It makes sense to
> me.

Currently makepkg downloads files with wget into the same dir where PKGBUILD is.
So if we gonna use SRCDEST only, it should write it there.
But /var/cache/pacman/src is owned by root. :(
It's weird, but even when I make .../src dir owned by my user -
makepkg doesn't put file there after download.
What fakeroot gives instead of chroot?

> > 6. Overabundance of options in makepkg- I was trying to find a new
> > letter for a '--repackage' option and we are pretty much out of
> > lowercase letters. At the moment we have two basic types of options:
> > things that can be done in the pkgbuild options line, and things that
> > directly affect the way makepkg works (geninteg, skip integs, location
> > of PKGBUILD). Are the first type truly necessary? It would make
> > makepkg a bit more streamlined if the only options were those that
> > can't be done somewhere else. So i propose the '--nostrip',
> > '--keepdocs', and any other option like this be removed.

No! Because then user cannot get exactly the same results on his box
without knowledge of those --nostrip/--keepdocs etc. options given by
package maintainer. Then he will build some package without --nostrip
and will wonder why it doesn't work.

> I couldn't agree more.  Perhaps it's time to split makepkg into two
> different scripts.  I don't know if I can see a good dividing line,
> however.  Alternatively, we don't really need command line options for
> _every_ config setting.  Perhaps we can limit these in some way...
> I'll look into it tonight as well.

Two scripts? 1) why? 2) what they should do?

> Ideas for backends are always welcome.  The interface exists in
> be_files.c in libalpm.  It's fairly straightforward.  People seem to
> prefer a "real database" backend (while at the same time suggesting
> sqlite which is far from a real database, but I digress), but I think
> that is overkill.  There are a few ideas I had milling around, but
> haven't fleshed anything out - discussion is always a good idea.

There was a patch against 2.9.8 that added gdbm support. I dunno if it
was adapted to pacman 3 later. I can resend it to you, or maybe I'll
find the bug #.


-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)