Use of libapt to fetch/parse Packages and Sources
Hi folks,
As part of the work taking place to update wanna-build to use a
PostgreSQL backend, I'm looking at how to improve the way we
import package data into the database (currently done by hand
using quinn-diff). What we want to do is this:
For each architecture (including all), for each
given suite/component, we want to download the Packages and Sources
files. We then want to parse those files and inject the data into
our database.
I was wondering about the suitability of libapt for this purpose.
However, after looking at the public API, I'm not entirely sure
how to do this. I don't fully appreciate how abstracted various
parts of the system are, or which classes I would need to use.
For example, can I get the files without storing them in the
cache, or is the cache absolutely required. If the same package
is available in multiple suites/components, can I always
unambiguously distinguish them, even if identical?
If so, could I have a separate APT config, including sources.list
and cache directories (if required) to take care of this?
I saw the tagfile class handles parsing of the files, but are
there higher-level classes to represent individual binary and
source packages as objects in their own right?
Lastly, would this functionality also be available through the
perl binding?
I'm mainly looking at getting a handle on which bits of libapt-pkg
I need to do this. Are there any examples of this already, or
any overviews of how the various classes act together?
Thanks,
Roger
--
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