[pacman-dev] repose and contributing generic PKGINFO/database parsers

[Allan McRae]

On 31/10/16 08:39, Simon Gomizelj wrote:
> Hey, so following up with discussions that happened yesterday on
> #archlinux.

<snip>

So many issues to respond to in one email!

1) Are we interested in a repo-add replacement?

Yes - I was looking at being able to add source package information to
repositories (which could server as a replacement to ABS) and found
repo-add to limited.  We also have a package information parser in
repo-add and another one in libalpm, so there is unneeded duplication there.

Adding source package information also brings up the issue we currently
have with .db and .files repos containing overlapping information.
Where does source package info go?   But this is a separate discussion.


2) Are we interested in more general purpose parsers?

The libaplm parsers were not suitable for your purpose for some reason.
We would need more information of what would need changed to consider
whether to include it. But, in general, making libalpm more useful for
other projects is a something we consider.


3) Using ragel to generate the parsers.

This interests me much less.  I agree that we could gain some speed
here, but that really is not an issue...   "pacman -Sii glibc" parses
every repo in my pacman.conf and takes in total less than 0.3 seconds on
my system.  That is not much room for gain for the addition of another
build time dependency and the need for contributors to learn ragel syntax.

Allan