[pacman-dev] Places to start with pacman code - Was: GPG work

[Dan McGee]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 7:11 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Jatheendra wrote:
>>
>> There are a few people like myself who are interested in working on
>> pacman. I started looking at pacman code a few weeks back, had a look
>> at bug tracker and send a patch for a simple feature(pacman -Qo
>> which). After that i was stuck because i couldnt find anything to work
>> on. Most of the feature requests are huge changes and it doesnt seem
>> that there is consent on those even within current developers. So it
>> would be better if we can have a roadmap sort of thing for pacman (
>> not the TODO.dan and TODO.aaron in source) with features which
>> developers want to include but are unable because of lack of time.
>> Basically something which beginners can use to get their hand
>> wet.........
>>
>> (If such a list already exists, i couldnt find it)
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> This is something I have not got around to finishing which should be fairly
> simple to do:
>
> FS#9424 - db.lck storing pid
> I have a patch which stores the pid in the lock file here:
> http://dev.archlinux.org/~allan/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=060c73be
> The idea is that when a lock file is present, pacman reads in this number,
> checks if the process exists and if not automatically removes the lock file.
>
> Other than that, look at bugs in the low or very low priority categories.
>  Most ideas we have for pacman improvement are posted there so we don't lose
> them.  The lower priority level normally mean that it is a nice idea but the
> devs have other things they want to do.  I found these to be a goldmine of
> fairly simple fixes when I was learning the pacman code base.  If you have
> queries about a specific idea, just post here asking for opinions or some
> direction on how to fix it.

A few ideas:
* globbing for sync operations: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/1561
* multiple pacman instances on same cache: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8226
* Allow -Qo to perform functional which (started, looks like it still
needs some follow-up): http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8798