[aur-general] Only lower case letters?

canyonknight canyonknight at gmail.com
Sun Jan 13 16:17:32 EST 2013


On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Alexander Rødseth <rodseth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking forward, what would it take for AUR to support split packages?
> Are there any particular or known obstacles, if one were to try to
> write a patch?

The relevant bug entry is FS#16394 [1]. Also the task it depends on,
FS#15043, is quite important [2]. The basic issue is PKGBUILD parsing
is really difficult to do.

Take a look at the source for pkgsubmit.php [3]. In particular, lines
122-272 are representative of the craziness that takes place when the
AUR currently tries to parse a PKGBUILD.

IMHO, the only realistic way of ever including split packages in the
AUR is the use of a source package metadata file. A dead easy to parse
file within a source tarball that can give the AUR all the information
it needs without all the bash parsing it currently attempts.

I actually did a test a while back of such a file that the AUR could
parse. It not only cut out a lot of cruft from the submission logic,
but also fixed a few bugs and made split packages feasible.

Just as a side note, a recent commit provides a more helpful error
message when a user tries to submit a split package [4]. The
particular PKGBUILD in the original post was crafted in a way so that
error wasn't triggered and that cryptic message was printed.


[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16394
[2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15043
[3] https://projects.archlinux.org/aur.git/tree/web/html/pkgsubmit.php
[4] https://projects.archlinux.org/aur.git/commit/?id=789245077d1ded7b2aaf4631bbca2a9267690739


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