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

[Simon Gomizelj]

Hey, so following up with discussions that happened yesterday on
#archlinux.

So, for context, I have a project for building Arch Linux repositories
in an automated way: https://github.com/vodik/repose

Some of you guys are aware of the project, but for those that aren't,
its an alternative for the repo-add and repo-remove utilities. It
attempts to intelligently build an optimal repository from a pool of
packages and automatically handles incremental rebuilds in an automated
way. For the most part, its faster than repo-add and fits better with
makepkg and PKGDEST.

As part of the project I've had to write my own utilities for processing
tarballs and parsers and for the pacman database desc/depends/files
entries and .PKGINFO file. I wanted to use reuse the official libalpm
utilities, but I found them too tightly coupled into how libalpm expects
to be used and the layout of the package structure.

I initially copied out the internal parsers and modified them, but
they've since been replaced with ragel-generated standalone parsers.
They have their own test coverage and do run quite a bit faster.

I'm curious if there's any interest in accepting some of this work and
on what kind of terms? As patches to libalpm for my decouple parsers? Is
ragel okay? Or if maybe its something that's best as a standalone
library?