On Wed, June 11, 2008 14:45, Dave Heistand wrote: > Hi, Greetings! > What I'm looking for is a way to see a diff of my package cache prior to > and just after syncing, i.e. what packages are out of date (which pacman > does show), what packages have been removed from the repositories since my > last sync and what packages have been added to the repository since my > last sync. To my knowledge, no developer supported package doing this is available, but there may be very well a host of shell scripts in one of the TURs fulfilling your requirements, more or less (likely less ;]). Some CVS magic on the ABS-tree may be the way to go, though, it's all in there. You just need to keep/extract the date of your last sync operation. > To me Arch package building is refreshing when compared to my experiences > with ebuilds and rpm spec files. I can't seem to find a list of all the > varibles that can be used in a PKGBUILD script though (like $startdir > etc), where would I find that info? Your best bet is 'man PKGBUILD'. You may, of course, define your own variables to use throughout the build process if you need any. Prefixing those with something (common choice is an underscore) to prevent name clashes helps, though. The Wiki elaborates on this in the packaging guidelines a bit. > If I end up totally switching I want to make my own repository (like a > yum or apt repository) of my custom packages for the systems I manage. I > think I've seen a few pages on how to set that up but if there is an > authoritative page someone knows of I'd appreciate it. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Custom_local_repository I've looked over it right now, and this is the way to go, using repo-add and repo-remove. To paraphrase the wiki page, just throw all packages you want to keep in your repository into an invariant directory, possibly using the PKGDEST variable in your build machine's /etc/makepkg.conf (see manpage for details), and run repo-add to define the name of the <foo>.db.tar.gz file in that directory, as well as all packages that shall be indexed (wildcards help). <foo> is then, by definition, the name by which your repository will have to be referenced in /etc/pacman.conf files. Sharing this directory via http/ftp is straightforward. Syncing will then consider your repo, and you may install explicitly versions from your repo by using the lesser known 'pacman -Sy <foo>/mypackage' syntax, where an explicit repo name is prefixed. > I've been running arch on my laptop and home system for almost a week now > and I am very happy with the results so far. That's always nice to hear! I always considered Arch's packaging one of the distribution's strong points. > Thanks in advance for your help, > Dave You're welcome, Dennis
