[aur-dev] AUR2 API
Sebastian Nowicki
sebnow at gmail.com
Sat Feb 21 03:23:39 EST 2009
Hi,
I sent a similar mail over a year ago with no response, but this time
I wrote up a draft on the wiki[1]. I'd like some suggestions and
general feedback about the API, particularly from AUR client
developers. I know there was some progress made on an API for the
current AUR, but I can't find any end-user documentation for it. Is it
finished? If the current interface is nice, there's no point re-
designing it. It would be better to maintain compatibility if API
clients already exist.
As noted in the wiki, I think a well designed API is vital. This would
allow a lot of neat tools for managing packages (uploading, updating,
TU management) and easier integration with the makepkg/pacman
toolchain for installing packages. It is quite possibly more important
than the website itself.
It occurred to me that we could eliminate the /api/ url part, and use
the same URLs for various resources, but simply use different content
types[2] to return HTML or JSON/XML/YAML/etc. I.e., we could have http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.html
, which shows the normal HTML page users would see, but if we change
to http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.json, we get only the data in
JSON format. If the extension is not supplied, it could default to the
html output. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but it would
make sense, since the business logic is identical, only the output
differs.
[1]: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_2#Draft
[2]: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_2#Content_Types
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