[pacman-dev] [RFC] Package parser in python

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is one part of the makepkg test suite I am working on.   It is fairly a
> simple class that takes a pacman package filename and does some parsing.
>  Currently that involves getting the file list and the info from the
> .PKGINFO file.
>
> I am still fairly new to python so I am looking for comments on how this
> could be improved.
> One idea I have had is to not initialize all the fields in the pkginfo dict
> and add a test if an array exists before appending.  It would make the code
> tidier but that would mean the need to test if the field exists when
> comparing it later.

Might be worth comparing this to reporead.py in archweb, which parses
DBs as opposed to packages.

One thing eliott did there that would make this a little less verbose,
he has a tuple of valid keys, and uses that to construct the resulting
dictionary.

Also, if you're going to be dealing with lots of packages, he does
some neat 'set' tricks