[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Separate file parsing from backend

[Xavier]

First replying to these two points before looking at the rest..

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Henning Garus
<henning.garus at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> I removed the memset for the line array, it should be fairly safe and I
> ran valgrind with several pactests and it did not shout at me (at least
> after I supressed the numerous leaks reported for bash).
>

AFAIK, you should use the following binary when using valgrind :
src/pacman/.libs/lt-pacman
But I never tried to understand what all that libtool mess is about.

> Btw, is there a reason why pacman uses two different file formats (line
> based in db files vs. keyword = value in .PKGINFO ?
>

This one has bugged me since I joined, like 2 years ago :)
See http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-June/003179.html
Unfortunately, all mailing list links have been broken :( Here is the
correct one for the previous post :
http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2006-March/000280.html

The problem is that changing the package and database is not an easy
task, we have to consider migration and conversion, backward
compatibility, etc. So we should only change the format if it provides
significant benefits.