[pacman-dev] Splitting packages with makepkg

[Allan McRae]

Hi all,

Now that pacman 3.2 is out the door and the initial bug fixes appear 
done, I am going to work on adding the package splitting feature to makepkg.

So the time has come for some input on the prototype PKGBUILD for 
splitting packages again.  We discussed this a couple of months ago on 
this list 
(http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-June/012123.html).  From 
that discussion I have come up with a PKGBUILD prototype which I like 
(prototype 1 at http://dev.archlinux.org/~allan/splitpkg.html) which is 
inspired by the KDEMod method but has a few significant differences.

This is a call for comments or other prototypes to implement this 
function.  Some "rules" to help us all with this:

1) If submitting a new idea, attach a complete prototype (based on the 
one distributed with pacman) so we can see all details of how the 
packaging is done.  Add notes if necessary.  Point out the advantages of 
your method.

2) Note that the ability to separate the building and packaging stages 
of a PKGBUILD is going to be added to makepkg so that fakeroot is used 
for the smallest amount of time.  Any new prototype should account for this.

3) No comments about how splitting packages is bad and this will be the 
ruin of Arch.  Arch does not favor package splitting in its main repos 
and this will not change that fact.

Allan