[pacman-dev] makedepends and checkdepends in .PKGINFO and repo databases

[Mark Weiman]

I am working on a repository manager in PHP that uses a PHP extension that
allows use of libalpm from PHP. While designing this though, I've noticed that
makedepends and checkdepends are listed in packages created with makepkg in
.PKGINFO that libalpm seems to not care about. Then when adding a package to a
repository with repo-add, those values get copied over into the desc file for
said package.

Since there's no effective way to open xz compressed archives in PHP (because
most packages in Arch use .tar.xz), it brought up questions of why are these
values included in packages and repositories when libalpm seemingly doesn't take
note of them and if there is a reason for it, why doesn't libalpm have ways of
getting those values back.

My suggestion would be either of the following:

1. Remove checkdepends and makedepends from makepkg and repo-add.
2. Add alpm_pkg_get_checkdepends() and alpm_pkg_get_makedepends() to libalpm.

Either of the above are something I'm willing to work on if one of these are
appropriate to add.

Mark Weiman