[pacman-dev] Warning to pacman-git users - database format change

[Dan McGee]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 13/12/10 20:06, Allan McRae wrote:
>>
>> On 13/12/10 19:46, Thomas Bächler wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 13.12.2010 05:19, schrieb Allan McRae:
>>>>
>>>> Pacman's local database format changes with this commit being pushed to
>>>> master:
>>>>
>>>> commit 21833d90e26635fdd2c6af247790a9bf374b4d80
>>>> Author: Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org>
>>>> Date: Sat Oct 30 15:35:43 2010 +1000
>>>>
>>>> Merge desc and depends files in local db
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If you want to run pacman-git you will need to upgrade your pacman
>>>> database format using the conviently named "pacman-db-upgrade" script in
>>>> the scripts/ directory. This is not a particularly reversible
>>>> operation, so if you run this you are stuck with pacman-git until the
>>>> 3.5 release.
>>>>
>>>> Note that various scripts rely on the old database format. That
>>>> includes namcap (which Dan is already fixing!).
>>>
>>> Will you add a patch to pacman 3.5 to do this conversion automatically
>>> if needed ("You are using an old database format. Do you want to run
>>> pacman-db-update to convert to the new format? [Y/n]")? It would
>>> probably save us from lots of headaches.
>>>
>>
>> I assume it will be done automatically in the post_upgrade script.
>
> I have just been pointed out that this will not work so well...   We check
> pacman is not running in the pacman-db-upgrade script, so it can not run in
> post_upgrade.

Hmm. Probably a good thing to have now realized- I don't know how
great of an idea modifying the database while running is anyway, with
hacks like this I've found in the last few days:
http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/lib/libalpm/add.c?h=maint#n498

It would be nice to automate it at the end of the pacman run, but no
hooks yet...any ideas from anyone?

-Dan