[pacman-dev] Libalpm direction and usage by others

[Xavier]

Miklos Vajna wrote:
> 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.
> 

Well, maybe if pacman was really designed with this in mind, I would 
find it less ugly indeed.

>> 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
> 
> 

That's true, but hmm.. Even though I don't know python well, it seems 
many programmers like it and are efficient with it, so it would probably 
be more practical from that point of view.