[pacman-dev] [RFC] support for URL query strings and fragments

[Xyne]

Hi,

pacman/libalpm currently only supports "bare" server URIs of the form

    <scheme name> : <hierarchical part>

whereas a full URI is

    <scheme name> : <hierarchical part> [ ? <query> ] [ # <fragment> ]

Support for query strings would allow for more flexible server configurations
using dynamic content. For the sake of a concrete example, I'm in the middle of
rewriting Pacserve and I could really use "?repo=$repo&arch=$arch" to keep all
packages in one apparent server directory while still being able to correctly
redirect to external mirrors. Redirection requires both values to determine and
interpolate the server URL before returning it to Pacman with a 307.

At first I thought this would be relatively easy to do. I took a quick look
at the code but I didn't find a common function to affix the file name to the
URL (although I did see "sanitize_url" in db.c).

I see two ways of doing this:

1) Support a "$file" variable in the URL. If the URL doesn't contain
   the variable, add the file name to the end as usual.

2) Remove the query and fragment, treat the URL as usual, then restore the query
   and fragment.

The first would allow for file names in query strings (e.g. "?file=$file"). It
could be used for a build server, for example. Of course, you can extract the
file name from the request path but that requires hacking the server code or
using something like mod_rewrite to mangle URLS. Having the file name sent in a
get variable is much more convenient for server-side programming.

In either case, it should be enough to have a single, central function that
accepts the template URL and the filename (pkg or db) and returns the full URL.
The sanitize_url function would also need to handle query strings and fragments.

Would there be any objection to this if a patch were submitted?