Bug#704594: ITP: python-arpy -- library for accessing the archive files and reading the contents

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 04:04:24PM +0200, Christoph Egger wrote:
>   So what do you suggest as a solution for an debian-independent ar
> module *right* *now*? I don't care specifically about arpy or whatever
> else as long as it can a) handle compressed ar-s and b) is
> vendor-neutral. arpy seems to provide both and I am currently not aware
> of any (reasonable) alternatives.

Work with upstream to address the remaining issue. There already are way
too many incomplete implementations. Similarly I had to put packaging
python-ssdeep on hold, because the upstream software has too many severe
issues. Not every software on the planet is worth including in Debian as
is and arpy needlessly fails at a very basic task.

The main problem here is that as far as I can see the API will have to
change in order to address this legitimate use case. Once a library has
larger adoption, changing it is harder and this issue will never be
fixed. Better do it now before exposing in Debian. I even provided a
proof of concept for how to do it.

Failure to insist on getting this right will just result in multiple ar
parsing libraries. I imagine that one version can read all the variants,
another one can read from stdin, a third one can write. This is a
disservice to our users and wastes resources (especially in package
lists).

So maybe we can work on a solution here? I'll try to patch arpy to
support this use case. Give me a week?

Helmut