[pacman-dev] [PATCH 2/2] Allow wildcards in PURGE_TARGETS to match any type of file except for directories.

[Jeremy Huntwork]

On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 1:48 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
> Am I missing something here? How does that differ from the plain "rm -f
> ${pt}"?

It matches subdirectories, too, which may or may not be what is really intended.

If pattern = "dir1/dir2/*.txt" then:

The rm -rf method will match *.txf files in dir1/dir2

The find method will in addition match "dir1/dir2/dir3/*.txt", which may or may not be what is intended.

After playing with this for some time, it seems to me that using PURGE_TARGETS only for the contents of a split package is backwards. PURGE_TARGETS may be useful for specifying file patterns (like *.la) that one may not want at all, anywhere (in any package). But I don't think it's useful as describing what should be in the final split package. In situations where you have more than 2 split packages, you'll need to specify certain patterns more than once. Not to mention that there is duplication of effort - 'make install' is run more than once and files are installed and removed from disk more than is necessary.

I would much prefer that the package is built with the idea that 'make install' (or equivalent) is done once and that the packaging tool has an overall view of what files are, or are not included in individual packages - such that it can easily keep track of duplicate files added to packages (error: pkg1 has /bin/file1 and so does pkg1-sub1!) or what files were not packaged at all.

JH