[pacman-dev] [arch-dev-public] Filename search for Arch

[Aaron Griffin]

On Jan 27, 2008 11:31 AM, Jeff Mickey <jeff at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2008 7:47 PM, Miklos Vajna <vmiklos at frugalware.org> wrote:
> > i see only once design issue here: repo-add would then generate
> > something that is only used by an external tool?
> >
> > - VMiklos
>
> External in the sense of outside of pacman, yes.  But if it's an
> "official" tool of arch, I don't see the problem here.  If anything,
> we could make yet another script that wraps around repo-add if you
> really don't want the functionality in repo-add.

I agree with vmiklos here. repo-add is not "an official tool of arch"
- it's an official tool for pacman, which, while used by arch, we try
to stay fairly generic with. So if the utilitiy to do this search is
arch specific, then repo-add should not be changed.

This idea sure has sparked a lot of discussion. I'm not sure if the
original thread bled over from arch-dev-public, so here's my idea:

We allow repo-add to build additional tarballs (--make-filelist),
pacman has an option like SyncFilelists that checks the server for
those tarballs on an -Sy operation.  Now, here's where it gets fun.
I'm not suggesting the one-giant-file format for this. I'm suggesting
a tarball that can be unpacked right on top of the existing sync DB,
that simply has the 'filelist' files in it. This way it's almost
trivial to extend -Qo and other ops from the local DB to the sync DB.