[pacman-dev] Why alpm_list.h?

[Dan McGee]

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Moritz Wilhelmy <ml+pacman at barfooze.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> since I started to dig into pacman's code, I've also started to wonder why
> exactly libalpm reinvents the wheel by using it's own list implementation
> rather than sys/queue.h (see QUEUE(3) for details). Is it for backwards
> compatibility or what are the exact reasons to handle it this way?

Things I can think of off the top of my head, although I do not know
the thinking process way back when:
1. It isn't POSIX
2. I don't see any sort of search/sort/merge functionality, which we
use for some very key pieces of code
3. It seems woefully unrich in some features and it isn't clear how to extend it

-Dan