[pacman-dev] PATHNAME in sync/*/desc

[Dan McGee]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Mark Constable <markc at renta.net> wrote:
> I'm just checking if this could be a reasonable idea and if so I'd look into
>  providing a patch. Would it be feasible to add a %PATHNAME% variable
>  to the sync desc file ?
>
>  For instance in this case, fetching "any" arch packages would not need to
>  symlinked into the same directory to be found...
>
>   %FILENAME%
>   hotstuff-0.9.2-1-any.pkg.tar.bz2
>
>   %PATHNAME%
>   ../any/
>
>  It may provide repo maintainers with some flexibility (hard to test without
>  it being possible) and perhaps %PATHNAME% could also be a URL and that
>  might also be interesting, but the simple relative path prefix would be useful.
>
>  Any thoughts?

Yeah, I have some thoughts. :)

Not a huge fan of this behavior, as I really like the current scenario
where the DB always lives with the packages. It greatly simplifies the
need for repo-add to do anything funny with the paths, as we just know
to always add the basename of the file. That would need to be
addressed if we added this functionality- how would you add relative
paths using repo-add? Would it generate the relative path on its own
(possibly traversing out of webserver accessible directories which
will break your repository), or would you have to specify an
additional path? What if I build my DB in one place, but serve it in
another (something I actually do)? We haven't even begun to talk about
deltas and where they should live. This came up when Xavier and I were
researching the delta creation being done in repo-add.

Of course, I see the advantages this could offer with the -any
packages, I just wanted to get my two cents in from the other side.

-Dan