[pacman-dev] Summary of pacman development

[Dan McGee]

This is a quick summary for all of us on the list to see if we are on
the same page. I just wanted to get out what we've gotten accomplished
in the last month or so, and where we need to go from here to maybe
get a pacman 3.1 release pushed out the door. We have had some 272
commits since the version 3.0 tag, so we have gotten some work done,
but I don't think any of us are very clear on where the 3.1 release
should be.

Things we've done:

* A lot of makepkg cleanup courtesy of Andrew Fyfe.
(http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=pacman.git&a=search&st=commit&s=makepkg)

* Brought xdelta support into official makepkg- we still need to
decide on a strategy for using this if we want to.

* Switched to bsdtar usage in makepkg- we no longer depend on the
multitude of unzip programs as bsdtar can handle most of them now.

* Added several pactests to isolate small issues, most from Nagy Gabor.

* Implemented topological support for dependency sorting, courtesy of
Nagy Gabor.

* Several other small fixes all over the place, and a good amount of
code refactoring.

* Gettext will now work for our shell scripts- we now have a whole lot
more strings that need translating. :)

* Bugs closed:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?events%5B%5D=2&event_number=20&project=3&do=reports

Things to do:

* Pacman and directory symlinks:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7484
http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-June/008638.html
This is quite the fun little bug. A lot of it deals with our
transition both to libarchive, and then to the 2.X branch of
libarchive. Andrew has a proposed patch for this problem

* Remove CHOST from makepkg.conf? (
http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-July/008662.html)

* Fix some bugs related to dependencies: FS 7495, 7416

* FS 7406- NREP umask issue. We should ensure that libalpm and pacman
are setting sane umasks for their operations, and we don't get things
that have the wrong umask such as db entries.

* FS 7193- pacman -D is missing. We should reimplement this as a
suboperation of -U such as --asdep or something. It shouldn't be too
hard- look at the commit we removed this operation in and revert the
parts of it that are necessary, and just use different command line
flags.

* FS 7137/7133- looks like DB issues

* FS 7271- makepkg caching netfiles- should be a super quick fix for
someone like Andrew (hint, hint) :) Just look at Roman's last comment

* Asciidoc- this is coming along great, Andrew and I have a separate
branch for now we are maintaining it in. This should make writing man
pages much more pain-free. A few formatting issues probably need
working out, but this will also allow us to make much prettier online
HTML-formatted documentation.

* Current pactests known to fail:
requiredby004, sync022, upgrade051.

If anyone else on the ML has things to add to this list, please get it
out here. Eventually we can lay out a timetable for pacman 3.1 release
and start doing some serious testing and regression testing.

-Dan