[pacman-dev] PacTrac was: Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] ArchISO FTP Installer - Testers Needed

[Raymano Garibaldi]

PacTrac is based on the Andy Robert's Jacman. It is GPL v2. Along with
other FaunOS source code, PacTrac source code is available from the
FaunOS svn repos at http://svn.faunos.com.

You can browse it here:
http://viewvc.faunos.com/viewvc.cgi/src/pactrac/trunk/

And the PKGBUILD is available here:
http://viewvc.faunos.com/viewvc.cgi/pkgbuilds/extra/pactrac/trunk/

Lack of documentation for libalpm is the main reason why we didn't use
it. As far as I'm concerned the libalpm documentation is a joke
(http://www.archlinux.org/pacman/libalpm.3.html).  We also read in the
forums and the pacman website that it was not finalized and it might
change.

You can not expect people to use an API that has no clear
documentation and no stable interface that they can count on. And you
can not expect a developer to try to figure out an API by scanning
mailing lists, at least not this one. If it takes anyone longer to
figure out an API than write their own software, well guess what
they're going to do.

Currently I am keeping a close eye on Shaman, http://shaman.iskrembilen.com
Very promising but hasn't stablized yet.

Regards,
Raymano



On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> matthias at archlinux.de wrote:
>
>  >> 2008/3/27, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu>:
>  >>>
>
> >>> Do we know something about its license or source code? Is this a native
>  >>>  libalpm stuff or not?
>   >>
>  >> No idea.
>  >> I think there should be sources somewhere on faunos.com
>  >
>
>  > Here is a link: http://viewvc.faunos.com/viewvc.cgi/src/pactrac/
>   > License should be GPL2 (like the rest of Faun.
>   >
>
>  Funny. Either people think libalpm sucks so much than it's not even
>  worth trying to use and improve, or writing bindings is too complicated
>  and not worth it? Or a little of both.
>  Seems like pacman3 is quite useless, when are we going back to pacman2? :)
>
>  Or maybe it should just be directly written in a language where ppl
>  could more easily write a gui (or other tools) in? Like python maybe.
>  That way, anyone can write pacman related tools without reinventing the
>  wheel every single time.
>  Seeing all these tools either calling pacman directly, or redoing all
>  the work themselves by parsing the config and metainfo files make me cry.
>
>
>
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