[pacman-dev] should repo-add handle *.links.db?

[Andrew Gregory]

On 03/26/19 at 10:42pm, Erich Eckner wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019, Allan McRae wrote:
> 
> > On 27/3/19 7:20 am, Erich Eckner wrote:
> >> https://mirror.pkgbuild.com/core/os/x86_64/core.links.tar.gz
> >>
> >> It contains (as far as I can tell) the names and versions of libraries
> >> against which binaries in a package are linked.
> >
> > This is not a repo, so should not be managed by repo-add.
> 
> Thanks for your answer, but:
> 
> Is the *.files.tar.gz a "repo"?
> 
> My interpretaion (so far) was, that the *.files.tar.gz and *.links.tar.gz 
> files are caches for search accellerations inside the repo (the first for 
> "who owns that file" and the second for "who links against that file") - 
> is this not the case?
> 
> Also note, that managing the *.links.tar.gz file with repo-add would have 
> benefits from a cleanness point of view: currently it's created 
> asynchronously but it could be created synchronously (e.g. *.db.tar.gz, 
> *.files.tar.gz and *.links.tar.gz would be always in-sync).
> 
> Furthermore, each downstream distribution wanting to have sogrep 
> needs to implement the createlinks script asynchronously, too. This would 
> become obsolete if it was part of repo-add.

I don't understand these arguments.  sogrep is the only thing
consuming these databases and no other uses have been proposed.  Why
can't sogrep provide a script to create its own databases that
distributions can use in their tools at the same time they call
repo-add?  I'm not very familiar with them, but I know Arch has
various scripts for building packages and managing repos; just have
them call `buildlinksdb`, or whatever, immediately after repo-add.