repose

Owning more than one Archlinux machine, I operate my own repository to distribute customized and/or extra packages between the various machines. repo-add, the provided tool for repository management, is frustratingly limited. Updating the repository after building a series of packages quickly turned into a slow monstrous bash script: either I had to have rather complex logic to figure out which packages are new, or I had to do the expensive operation of rebuilding the repository each time. Surly, though, this was something that could be automated.

repose is an Archlinux repository compiler.

Generally, it operates by building up two package caches: one that represents the contents of the database and another that represents the various packages sitting in the root directory of the database. Updating, then, is simply a sync operation operation between the two.

To sync, it takes advantage of several rules of Archlinux repositories to automate as much logic as possible:

1. Repositories typically only hold one version of a package (and we're interesting in the newest version).
2. Repositories typically only hold only one architecture.
3. Repositories and packages are expected to be in the same directory.

Updating/Removing

Most simplistically:

repose -z foo

1. Parse the contents of foo.db if it exists.
2. If we find a new package in the database's folder, add it to the database.
3. If we can't find a corresponding package to a database entry, remove it from the database.
4. Write out an updated database.

To explicitly remove a package:

repose -zd foo [pkgs]

Removes the specified packages from the database.

To generate a complementary foo.files file, add the -f flags

repose -zf foo

Globbing

Its possible to use globbing. repose uses the following logic for finding/filtering packages:

1. Does it match the package's filename
2. Does it match the package's name
3. Does it glob pkgname-pkgver

This allows for operations like:

Add latest detected version systemd to a repo:

repose foo systemd

Add a specific version of systemd to a repo:

repose foo systemd-209-1

Drop all git packages from the repo:

repose -zd foo '*-git-*'

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