[pacman-dev] Parallel downloads

[Eli Schwartz]

On 2/1/19 4:04 PM, Dávid Bíró wrote:
> Dear Pacman Devs
> 
> I want to add a parallel download feature for Pacman. Is it a wanted
> feature? Should I do it? If yes, could you provide some docs for the code?

We have a feature request for this at https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20056

We're definitely interested in adding it, but no one has yet come forth
with both the time and interest in doing so, and actually implemented
it. There have been a couple of initial attempts which never went
anywhere...

So if you can develop a solution that does this well, it will most
likely be merged. :)

In the interest of ensuring that your efforts are directed in productive
directions, I encourage you to read the feature request ticket, and to
take note of the following requirement:
Quoting Allan (the lead developer) there:

> The primary target for development in terms of download is the
> internal (libcurl) downloader. I will not consider patches for
> implementing multiple transfers via XferCommand until it is
> implemented in the internal downloader. The implementation for both
> will overlap somewhat and maintaining support for non-basic features
> of the external downloader will never take precedence over
> implementing new features for the internal downloader. So I prefer
> not to implement a feature that we may deliberately break and remove
> in the future.

Also note that the solution would need to be compatible with more than
just Arch Linux -- e.g. the Windows MSYS2 framework is a significant
downstream user of pacman.

...

On the topic of docs,

pacman does have a doxygen target, although you should be warned that it
is still a work in progress. I currently host, for convenience, prebuilt
versions of the docs at https://pkgbuild.com/~eschwartz/pacman-docs/ in
both html and section 3 manpage format.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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