[pacman-dev] Future pacman development (3.2/4.0)

[Travis Willard]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:10:20 -0400
"Dan McGee" <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is a little email to get ideas flowing on what will follow the
> 3.1 release in pacman development.

One area I can see much improvement in is configuration.  I've noticed,
poking around the code, that parsing the configuration file and
applying the configuration once parsed is all left up to the
front-end.  Why is this?  

Looking at pacman.conf, the single configuration option that's
front-end-specific would be ILoveCandy.  Everything else - repo
locations, holdpkg, ignorepkg, noextract, and so on - seem to be
options that users would want to persist no matter what front-end
they're using.  If they launch the command-line pacman, or a KDE
front-end, or a Gnome front-end, the repos, ignored packages, held
packages, and so on should all be the same - in 99% of the cases, I'd
be willing to be the user would expect pacman to fetch from the same
repos no matter which front-end they used, for example.  This means that
every front-end will be parsing the same configuration files, using
their own code to do so, and will be re-inventing the wheel many times
over.

Along those lines, I think the back-end should handle configuration like
this, however it could also provide an API to add repos or
change these options permanently in the config file, so that GUI
front-ends could implement a GUI configuration too for example.  That
wouldn't be entirely necessary though, but it would be a nice interface.

Another improvement in the config area would be a better way to specify
repositories.  This has been brought up before - there's a lot of
copied info between the files in /etc/pacman.d and it can be annoying
to need to change 3-4 files if you want to change your mirror.  While
I'm not sure of how the syntax would look, specifying a base URL for
the mirror combined with which repos that mirror contains would
probably be the best bet.

Anyway, there's my two cents.

--
Travis