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#1 2013-11-11 05:49:51

Ramon
Member
Registered: 2013-11-11
Posts: 2

Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

Hi

Just a coincidence but possibly a useful one. freedesktop.org was down for a while and I sat there inmidst a pacbuilder <all xorg-*>.

No prob I thought, freedesktop has mirors. Nope, ugly prob because  I ended up having a) to create a sed script and b) to patch pacbuilder (with an -x switch to exec my script right after getting the PKGBUILD).

Right now Arch in all its beauty doesn't support mirror servers or easily changing the server in PKGBUILD of I'm not mistaken. Sure, one might use yaourt (or similar) and edit each and every PKGBUILD, but frankly I don't consider that a practical option when dealing with dozens or more file (as is the case when building e.g. xorg).

I therefore politely suggest/request to consider a "server" field in PKGBUILD and to have all "source" urls in "${server}/rest of path" notation. Evidently it would also be useful to make that into a commandline option/parameter. But even if not having a server field this would make life easier because with different maintainers in a group one can well end up with quite different urls.

In case someone is interested, for xorg my sed patterns were (I happened to choose ftp.sunet.se):

-e '/source=/ s_http://xorg\.freedesktop\.org/_ftp://ftp\.sunet\.se/pub/X11/ftp\.x\.org/_' \
-e '/source=/ s_${url}_ftp://ftp\.sunet\.se/pub/X11/ftp\.x\.org/_' \
-e '/source=/ s_ftp\.x\.org.*/individual_ftp\.x\.org/individual_'

As I'm new here: Apologies if I happened to misplace this thread or comitted formatting sins or the like.

Thanks.

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#2 2013-11-11 06:09:55

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

This was recently discussed on one of the mailing lists.  But I don't think it went anywhere. 

In any case, the forums are really not the right place to bring up such things.  If you want to request features, you should be doing so in the Arch bugtracker (which also handles feature requests).

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#3 2013-11-11 14:43:05

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

WonderWoofy wrote:

This was recently discussed on one of the mailing lists.  But I don't think it went anywhere.

https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail … 25934.html

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#4 2013-11-11 15:07:21

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,444
Website

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

I'm not sure why you'd need yaourt to edit a PKGBUILD.  All you need is a text editor.

I think there is a reasonable case to be made for this - but PKGBUILDS being difficult to edit is not one of the points for it.  PKGBUILDs are trivially easy to edit.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#5 2013-11-11 15:17:33

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

karol wrote:
WonderWoofy wrote:

This was recently discussed on one of the mailing lists.  But I don't think it went anywhere.

https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail … 25934.html

It might go somewhere if it was on the right mailing list - pacman-dev in this case. The inclusion of an implementing patch would also make it more interesting.

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#6 2013-11-11 15:43:34

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

tomk wrote:
karol wrote:
WonderWoofy wrote:

This was recently discussed on one of the mailing lists.  But I don't think it went anywhere.

https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail … 25934.html

It might go somewhere if it was on the right mailing list - pacman-dev in this case.

+1

I followed the discussion but I didn't pay attention on which ML was it on and it took me some time to find it, because I started with pacman-dev, went to arch-dev-public ... <sigh>

There's hope: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail … 25954.html says

Feel free to change it if it's broken and take all the credit and submit to pacman-dev. smile

(emphasis mine)

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#7 2013-11-11 18:30:08

Ramon
Member
Registered: 2013-11-11
Posts: 2

Re: Request for "server" field in PKGBUILD

Thank you all for your comments and hints.

Trilby wrote:

I'm not sure why you'd need yaourt to edit a PKGBUILD.  All you need is a text editor.

I think there is a reasonable case to be made for this - but PKGBUILDS being difficult to edit is not one of the points for it.  PKGBUILDs are trivially easy to edit.

Of course, I don't need an editor. Evidently and as I wrote, sed and other tools can be used. But that was not the issue; my desire/suggestion was to have *one* specific change to many PKGBUILDs applied, a classical case for a cmdline switch.

My suggestion/request has basically two reasons:

- it's inline with the the Arch way and would be an enhancement
- I doubt that the Arch community would profit from a plethora of little hacks by many users (I myself made one, too)

But I might well be wrong there. Anyway, you have provided links to a relevant mailing list and so I'll walk over there and read some before discussing more here.

Thank you!

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