Bug#693693: ben: Partial suite support

[Stéphane Glondu <glondu@debian.org>]

Le 19/08/2013 15:03, Johannes Schauer a écrit :
> not quite sure why I was CC'ed but I do have some comments for Iain :)

I've put you in CC because my proposal will basicaly revert your patch
from #714703 and offer an alternative solution. Actually, I should have
put this bug in CC... done.

> However, after thinking about it, I am planning to redesign the plumbing
> between commands. What I am planning to do is the following:
> 
>  * "download" will only download files;
>  * a new "import" command will take a list of Sources and Packages
>    files (or query projectb or some other kind of database), and create
>    a "ben.cache" file. This command would do the canonicalization phase
>    (i.e. add source and source-version fields to all binary packages,
>    etc.);
>  * a new "filter" command will add the uninstallable (previously
>    edos-debcheck) field, and any other additional massaging we'll want
>    in the future (like keeping only the last version or the
>    "is-in-testing" virtual field);
>  * the "query" command will be able to output "ben.cache" files as
>    well. It will basically act as the dual of "import";
>  * "monitor" will only read a "ben.cache" file.
> 
> Basically, it promotes "ben.cache"-like files (which are binary dumps of
> an OCaml datastructure and efficiently parsed) as first-class citizens,
> and the canonical format passed between commands, with bridges to the
> text control file format via import and query).


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane