[pacman-dev] [PATCH] repo-add; add option to remove existing package files from disk

[Simon Gomizelj]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 10:11:49AM +1000, Phillip Smith wrote:
> From: Phillip Smith <fukawi2 at gmail.com>

> when maintaining a custom repo, often it is undesirable to retain older
> versions of packages. this patch adds the --remove option to remove the
> current package file from disk before adding the new one to the
> database.

Sorry if this isn't the most appropriate place to share this, but its
somewhat relevant to the problem.

I've actually been developing a 3rd-party tool to replace repo-add for
database management: https://github.com/vodik/repose

It works different from repo-add - it tries to keep a directory and
a database in sync with each other. Filesystem changes propagate to the
database instead of having to be manually specified.

For example:

    repose -Uscf /srv/http/packages/vodik.db

Repose reads the existing database into memory, automatically scan
/srv/http/packages to determine which packages are newest, add them into
the database. It has various abilities to clean up after itself and
delete old packages.

If a package has been removed from the filesystem the update operation
will also drop it from the database, no need to manually call
repo-remove.

With this tool all I need to do is dump all the packages into one
directory and when I'm done run repose once.  The problem I had with
repo-add is I had to remember the packages which got updated to properly
update the database. Often I just ended up doing `repo-add
vodik.db.tar.gz *.pkg.tar.xz`, which is expensive and sometimes does the
wrong thing (replaces a new package with an older version).

Repose is slightly faster then repo-add when generating a new database
and substantially faster at updating and existing one. Most importantly
it let me remove _a lot_ of logic from my package rebuild scripts.