Arch Linux

piezoelectric

Member

Registered: 2009-09-08

Posts: 48

PKGBUILD variable idea: LOCALFILES

I think having a variable in the PKGBUILD that could optionally specify known files created in $HOME and /var would be pretty convenient.

Some examples for ssh could be

LOCALFILES=("~/.ssh/")
LOCALFILES=("~/.ssh/*")
LOCALFILES=("~/.ssh/authorized_keys" "~/.ssh/known_hosts")

It could be HOMEFILES and VARFILES...

It doesn't even have to be part of pacman per se, but really any sort of database that would help people keep their home directories clean (and /var) would be really nice.

PirateJonno

Forum Fellow

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2009-04-13

Posts: 372

Re: PKGBUILD variable idea: LOCALFILES

sounds like my idea of a good feature, although it would most likely be a nightmare for the packagers. might i suggest the variable be remaned 'dotfiles' so as to be more accurate? if not in pacman itself, it might be possible to do a wrapper with support for this - possibly with a community-maintained database. however I'm not sure its worth the effort, what with gconf & co. throwing a spanner in the works

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"You can watch for your administrator to install the latest kernel with watch uname -r" - From the watch man page

EVRAMP

Member

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2008-10-03

Posts: 173

Website

Re: PKGBUILD variable idea: LOCALFILES

I like this idea, Arch would be the only distribution to be able to completely remove a package with this!
However many files are created when using special function in software, such as ~/.ssh/known_hosts.old when managing known_hosts with ssh-keygen. This might need a lot of communication between users and developers with which i think Arch has no problem. I think just to list directories where the program writes its files is sufficient for the start, something like:

LOCALDIRS=("~/.ssh/")

This would however need some clever name for programs that are using only rc file for configuration such as LOCALFILE=("~/.conkyrc").