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

[Xyne]

> >> As a rather wild aside here... what would be the downside of sticking
> >> the entire PKGBUILD in the pacman DB? How much size would that add?
> >
> > Wont make that much sense (as it is not easily parsable and without patches
> > etc. quite useless) However for community/  core/  extra/  kde-unstable/
> > local/  testing/ it is (gzip compressed) 1,1M
> >
> > But you're just kidding, right?
> 
> Not exactly - I'm half serious. I mean, a) it'd give us all the
> information needed to build the package, b) it'd allow these scripts
> to work without an ABS tree.
> 
> I'm not saying pacman would _use_ it, I just think it'd be kinda neat.

Did anyone consider the idea that I mentioned in my previous reply?
A quick recap:

1) Don't change sync and local databases.

2) Add a new database, possibly named "abs" (/var/lib/pacman/abs)

3) Create an archive for each package that contains the files in the
current abs tree:
-- PKGBUILD
-- local source files

4) Create an abs database archive similar to the current sync db archive
that contains a file (or more) with information from the parsed
PKGBUILD, e.g.: %NAME%
foo
%VERSION%
2.3
%DEPENDS%
bar
baz
%MAKEDEPENDS%
this 
that
something else
%SOURCES%
foo-2.3.tar.gz
example.patch
foo.png

etc

5) Distribute this abs repo on the servers alongside the other repos.

The user would then sync the abs database (which would only contain
small files with the PKGBUILD info, so it wouldn't take much space) and
be able to download packages containing everything needed to build from
source The user would have the choice of installing the abs database
and would only download PKGBUILDs & local source files for what they
actually intend to build, unlike the current abs tree which dumps
everything on the users system (wasted bandwidth, wasted space). It
would also be non-Arch specific.