[pacman-dev] Hooks for pacman

[Aaron Griffin]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Marc - A. Dahlhaus [ Administration | Westermann GmbH ] wrote:
>>
>> Am Samstag, den 24.01.2009, 00:52 +1000 schrieb Allan McRae:
>>
>>>
>>> Marc - A. Dahlhaus [ Administration | Westermann GmbH ] wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>> what about an approach that keeps all settings of a specific hook inside
>>>> the hook script itself? This would just work after deployment of a hook
>>>> script in /etc/pacman.d/hooks.d without any configuration file hassle.
>>>> The Hooks would be self contained in files that pacman could source
>>>> before doing anything. And if someone wants to know what a hook do and
>>>> when it will be used there is only one place to look.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The one problem I see with that is that the actual script needs to be
>>> run.  The post_install scripts etc, just source and run the script in a
>>> shell.  This becomes more difficult if we have to keep information what
>>> files trigger the hooks to be run and when.
>>>
>>
>> The point was that this way you can install new hooks with packages and
>> they would just work without any configuration file fiddling. It would
>> be cleaner for a packager in my opinion.
>>
>
> I understood you point.  My point is that each hook need to provide the
> following information:
>
> 1. when to run it (per file or transaction)
> 2. what files trigger it running
> 3. a script that can be sourced and run by the shell.
>
> It is _a lot_ easier if 1 and 2 are separate from 3.  If you can propose a
> clean way to have them all together, then we will be happy to consider it.

Hmmm

#myhook
RUN=PerFile
PATTERN=/usr/share/info/*
#####
run () {
   ...
}

We could do something nasty where pacman parses the file, ignores all
lines that it doesn't match to '^RUN' or '^PATTERN', and possibly end
parsing early at some token (the ##### above)

Still, it's a little nasty. I almost prefer the manual config file
editing for a few reasons: It doesn't force the user to use these
hooks. *I* should have to turn on the install-info hook myself.