2006/9/3, Jason Chu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 18:17:01 +0200
> How would your file be different from anyone else's?  A developer's
> perhaps?

It wouldn't. But I have 533 packages in my cache, and it took almost
three hours to check them all. It would not be the first time that the
devs benefit from something like this without having to download all
the packages and do all the computational work by themselves...

> You know you could just run namcap /var/cache/pacman/pkg/* >
> ~/badpackages.log...

Uh, didn't know. I got used to pacman's syntax, which not always does
accept multiple names... thanks ;-)

> As long as developers are doing their jobs, they should have run namcap
> on the package before pushing it to the server.  Shouldn't that
> information be the same?

Yeah, they should've done it, but it doesn't seem everyone has done
so. I've got a really huge file (10958 lines, 3685 if we remove the
ones related to non-standard directories [still 34 packages] and to
testing packages), and some entries just shouldn't be ignored. A few
stats:
-138 included but already satisfied dependencies
-497 included and not needed deps (many false positives here for
unrecognized deps, mostly for interpreted languages)
-471 libtool occurrencies... and I doubt they're all necessary
-186 deps detected and not included (false positives here sometimes)

Do I need to go on? I'm not blaming the developers, I think it is
something that happens normally with time. It just needs to be fixed,
and the devs are the ones who can do it. If the help of the community
is needed, then we could call a dep-fixing day, rather then a
bug-squashing one...

> I've always wanted to keep namcap a simple rule-based package checker.
> I wouldn't want to sully its simplicity with an exception db.  Also,
> who would maintain it?  How often would it be updated?  Who says what
> messages are non-needed?

Yeah, that was just an idea. I don't really like it, too, but
discussion is good, maybe we'll come up with some good ideas.
You're right, it'd be really difficult to maintain, but I don't see
any point in advising the dev that /home/httpd is not a standard dir:
he knows it, he's the one who did it, and he did on purpose. This is
surely not enough, but there's more: it *is* standard for apache under
arch, isn't it? So why bother?

Another idea I don't like but may inspire someone to find something
with more sense: every package could have a namcap-targeted file that
says: yeah, I know you think I need gcc, but believe me, I don't, and
I know that those files seem to be where they shouldn't, but leave
them alone.
The problem of this approach is the lack of extensibility of arch's
package format, which is somewhat strict with the metadata, I think to
understand...

Anyway, thanks for your answer =)


bardo

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