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

[Christoph Egger <christoph@debian.org>]

Hi!

Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> writes:
> On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 12:34:12PM +0200, Christoph Egger wrote:
>> arpy is a library for accessing the archive files and reading the
>> contents. It supports extended long filenames in both GNU and BSD
>> format. Right now it does not support the symbol tables, but can
>> ignore them gracefully.
>
> Can you briefly explain the benefit of this library to you or the Debian
> project? As far as I can see this package mostly provides a very small
> subset of python-debian.

  Well I need a arfile implementation independant of Debian (for
non-debian-specific software). arpy provides exactly that. Asking
Fedora or even Windows users to install python-debian for not-at-all
Debian related software seems a bit strange.

> There is one feature I missed in python-debian's arfile
> implementation, but this isn't present in arpy either: Being able to
> interpret an archive read from a pipe.

  The 1.0.0 I intent to use can read ar from any file handle and should
therefore be able to provide exactly that. I have successfully used it
to handle bzip2 compressed ar-archives using python's bzip2 module.

> For instance the tarfile standard Python module does this for tar
> files. I see no reason for why a library for ar archives should fail
> at such a basic task. Maybe give upstream some more time to fix things
> on their end and get the API right before including it into Debian?

Regards

    Christoph