[pacman-dev] do we need requiredby?

[Aaron Griffin]

On Nov 15, 2007 4:39 AM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 14, 2007 6:08 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > We (anyone want to volunteer) also need to make a tool to remove
> > > requiredby entries.
> >
> > I was going to python it up... it's an easy file to parse and rewrite,
> > probably like 20 lines
> >
> > > I took an initial stab at it using libalpm, then I
> > > realized we have no explicit mechanism to tell the backend to write to
> > > the DB. Does this sound like something we should expose, or is it too
> > > low level?
> >
> > I'd say no. There's a reason why we don't have mutators for package
> > structures (front ends shouldn't be modifying that data).
> If you implement this with care (don't let the front-end corrupt the db), this
> is acceptable for me. Personally, sometimes I modify my localdb by hand (mostly
> %REASON%), which is much more dangerous than a well controlled
> localdb->pmpkg_t...edit...pmpkg_t->localdb process.
> After we removed %REQUIREDBY%, %REASON% is the only reason in my mind where this
...snip...

This is totally different from a design perspective. Dan mentioned a
generic mechanism to write, where as you're suggesting a unique
operation. A generic, public interface to modify and write to the DB
is, in my opinion, a bad idea, but operations which do things (and
write) within libalpm's control is fine