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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Xyne<xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:
>> 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?

Maybe "built" was too strong of a word... what I was trying to say:
You can see, somewhat, what was enabled at build time, to see what
things support, in some cases.