[pacman-dev] [PATCH] repo-add: don't break if delta package sources contain epoch

[Allan McRae]

On 5/1/19 9:23 am, Dave Reisner wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 11:20:04AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
>> On 28/12/18 9:15 am, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>>> Our sed parser for xdelta3 headers will greedily match on ":" which
>>> coincidentally is also the character we use to define a version with an
>>> epoch.
>>>
>>> While we are at it, simply use sed for the whole pipeline, rather than
>>> using both grep and sed.
>>>
>>> Fixes FS#61195
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Eli Schwartz <eschwartz at archlinux.org>
>>
>> OK.
>>
>> As an aside, the fact we are rewriting package version parsing code in
>> bash highlights again that repo-add really should be converted to a
>> libalpm program.
> 
> Not sure I understand this -- isn't the problem here the crappy output
> format of xdelta3? We're not really parsing versions, just contending
> with the human readable, colon-delimited table that we're forced to use.
> Rewriting against libalpm won't fix anything here, though if we were to
> rewrite in C, we could link to the "hidden" xdelta3 library or implement
> our own crappy vcdiff parser (eww, please no).

Yes - my initial through was this was fixing parsing of versions from
nicer output, but after I sent that emails I saw that was confounded
with xdelta output "goodness"...

> I don't want to open a can of worms (maybe I do), but I think delta
> handling is the least of the problems with repo-add. I'm aware of many
> users (myself previously included) that would either replace repo-add
> entirely, or wrap it substantially in order to make it truly useful. One
> such example is respose [0]. If we want to consider a rewrite, maybe we
> should rethink our approach to repo management and make a better tool,
> not just an equivalent one.

I agree.  I was going to come back to the design of the new replacement
after the writer had been added to libalpm.  I like repose, but I found
it does not really work if you wanted more than one repo in a package
directory.  It is very focused to a single workflow.  Saying that, I
think we can do better than the current repo-add which is far from great...

Allan