[pacman-dev] [PATCH] add makedepends to package and database

[Xyne]

> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> > Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> >>
> >> Am Sonntag 14 Juni 2009 10:28:00 schrieb Allan McRae:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> I'm not really a fan of this as it fills the PKGINFO file and pacman DB
> >>> with info that is really not needed.  At the moment you can simply grep
> >>> the ABS tree to check for depends/makedepends.
> >>>
> >>
> >> I am not sure myselfM; that's why I brought it up here.
> >>
> >> Of course this information is completely useless for user and just wastes
> >> space. But here I wonder if such a few bytes more really matter.
> >>
> >> On the other side this is really usefull if you write tools for packagers.
> >> The advantage of retreiving the information from the package/db over
> >> grepping the ABS tree is:
> >> * it does not depend on Arch
> >> * there is no need to check out the complete tree
> >> * tools can use a unified way to access all kinds of deps
> >>
> >> So, only a very limited group will benefit from this and if all others
> >> will have disadvantages we should probably drop the idea.
> >>
> >
> > Seeing the numbers you provided in the other email and the advantages
> > indicated here, I am now fine with including this in the pacman-db.  It
> > would be quite useful for my rebuild order script which currently misses
> > makedepends....
> 
> To further rationalize, it also helps answer the question "How was
> this package built?"

Would this let you rebuild a package from the database alone? Is the
other info from the PKGBUILD along with the local source files included
somewhere?

Can someone give some concrete examples of how this could be useful in
the absence of the other packaging information and who would be likely
to use this?