GSoC 2013: Binaries Idea

[Rainer Müller]

On 2013-04-15 14:09, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2013-4-14 14:37 , Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote:
>> I think binary packages could benefit from some other useful perks such
>> as: prior disk space requirement information and being able to query
>> port contents such as in [1].
>>
>> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pkgfile

We do not have packages (standalone), we only have binary archives
(still requires tree with Portfile).

> This would be nice to have of course. Looping through all the archives
> on the buildslaves and putting the size and contents into a database
> would be pretty simple; the interesting part is making the db accessible
> to users. The server-side portion needs to work behind the rather
> restrictive MacOSForge firewall. There are UI decisions to be made on
> the client side: Do you extend the existing 'contents' and 'provides'
> actions to also query the database of uninstalled ports, or add new
> actions, or add a separate command?

Couldn't we just put them into a PkgIndex and put them right next to
PortIndex? This index could also be used to eliminate the HTTP requests
for archives as we would know which one are definitely not available
from the mirrors. However, some users might want to use private mirrors
with additional archives (which are not allowed to be distributed
legally), so this has to be taken into account.

Rainer