[pacman-dev] Empty repo databases

[Xavier]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> With the community-testing repo now being empty, I get the following:
>>
>>> pacman -Syu
>> :: Synchronizing package databases...
>> kernel64 is up to date
>> testing                   10.3K   21.2K/s 00:00:00 [#####################]
>> 100%
>> core                      33.8K   34.8K/s 00:00:01 [#####################]
>> 100%
>> extra                    429.2K   13.0K/s 00:00:33 [#####################]
>> 100%
>> error: failed retrieving file 'community-testing.db.tar.gz' from <"mirror">
>> : Not Found
>> error: failed to update community-testing (Not Found)
>> community                365.3K   10.2K/s 00:00:36 [#####################]
>> 100%
>> :: Starting full system upgrade...
>> local database is up to date
>>
>> Can we leave a shell database somehow when using repo-rm on the last
>> package?  It seems [testing] has never been empty!
>
> Xavier is the expert on this one, I believe he has mentioned the empty
> DB case before.
>
> -Dan
>
>

This is an old commit from me : 37bb99abfa5672e101e34579882e22c7a1016a9b
(It was also brought up more recently by me, but it was just some code
rewrite, no behavior change).

Before, repo-rm on the last package would leave the last package in
the database, which was quite odd.
Having an empty file would be odd too, because tar/bsdtar would fail on it.

What about an empty tar archive ? It seems to be possible using :
bsdtar cvzf test.tar.gz -T /dev/null
(this works with gnu tar too)