[pacman-dev] do we need requiredby?

[Aaron Griffin]

On Nov 15, 2007 11:01 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 15, 2007 10:42 AM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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
>
> I actually wasn't referring to mutators to make that clear. I was
> thinking along the lines of a public alpm_pkg_force_write(pmpkg_t
> *pkg) or something. However, that still doesn't seem that clean, but I
> don't know.

Right, I was using that as an example... let me spit out more.

This here:
   alpm_change_install_reason(pkg);

is superior to:
   alpm_pkg_set_reason(pkg, 1);
   alpm_pkg_write(pkg);

because it puts the _operation_ in our control. It's about "use cases"
and all that fun crap 8)

I don't think we want to expose the ability to modify the database
with public functions in libalpm, but an operation that just happens
to modify it is different.