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

[Henning Garus]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 03:25:28PM +0200, Xavier wrote:
> 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.
> 

Thanks, I am actually finding something now, though nothing of it seems
to be related to line not being nulled. But I found another leak I
introduced. I will sent a new patch and go do some reading on libtool.

> > 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
> 

So it is historic and there is no real reason apart from "we didn't
change it with 3.0". I thought that much.

> 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.
>

Sure, I do not want to go ahead and change anything, I was just being
curious.