[pacman-dev] Libalpm direction and usage by others

[Miklos Vajna]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:33:18PM -0500, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3. Scrap the whole libalpm/split idea. Whoa! I know you are thinking
> "but that would be a step backwards!". Would it? I can tell you this-
> the pacman 2.9.8 codebase was about half the size of the current
> monster, and we have a lot of crazy design issues going on. Instead of
> trying to write a pacman library, why not just implement a friendly
> frontend, command-line interface, which is a bit more Unix-y? For
> example, monotone has its "automate" command (I haven't looked at this
> in some time, so let me know if I am wrong) that is designed to be
> used by other clients as machine-parseable. git is based around this
> concept as well- look at all the low level tools like rev-parse, etc.

there are other good examples, like git, darcs or mplayer's slave mode,
where the interface is script-friendly, so (almost) nobody claims for a
library.

> 4. Switch to something like python. I'm resistant to this idea.
> Although I think scripting languages like this have great benefits, I
> don't think pacman needs most of them. Having a package manager that
> always works is important to me, and part of me just thinks a
> low-level compiled language is the right thing for a system tool.

exactly. you probably heard of the poor gentoo guys who broke their
python, losing their package manager as well :P
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