poltroon

Foolishly updates existing packages from AUR (arch linux only)

1. Runs pacman --query --foreign to find already-installed packages are not in a sync database. Uses the aurweb RPC Interface to see which of those packages have newer versions available.
2. Asks if the user wants to proceed. Exits if they don't.
3. Starts a two-stage pipeline.
4. In the first stage, we download the package and untar it. (default it two workers).
5. In the second state, we run makepkg -s to build the package files.
6. At the end, we print out the command the user can run to install the packages.

All the action happens in /tmp/poltroon/ with a sub-directory for each package and a logs directory within that that can be inspected.

Inspired by cower, extending the idea even further.

Releasing

This is a way to release a new version

github-release info --repo poltroon  # see current version
VERSION="v0.2.0"  # or whatever
git tag -a "$VERSION" -m "release $VERSION"
git push --tags
github-release info --repo poltroon
github-release release --repo poltroon --tag "$VERSION" --pre-release

Also look into releasing binaries at some point.

Future changes

I think this is good enough for me, for now. Here are things I might look at in the future.

• More testing. If I mock out pacman, AUR, builds, I could have end to end testing.

• Simplify the pipeline. Right now there is a two stage pipeline, which is more complication than it is worth. Convert to a single state pipeline.

• Remove dependency on pacman (low priority). We currently run pacman --query --foreign to find packages to consider updating. We could extend the alpm package to contain this functionality. Right now it doesn't seem worthwhile. The current setup seems stable and fast.

• More automatic mode (medium priority). Find a way to let the user look at all the PKGBUILD files beforehand, then run pacman automatically afterwards. If we exec pacman after setting up the environment and the stdstreams, with sudo, it might do what I want?

• Look into running pacman with file:// urls. This would make it cache old versions, which allows for automatic downgrades. When I tried it, it complained about a lack of signatures, but there might be a flag that stops that.