[repoman] transport mechanism

[Paul Mattal]

Essien Ita Essien wrote:
> The first question that occurs to me is: "Why Transport At All?"
> 
> Basically, once we have a properly specified PKGBUILD and related files, 
> we can supposedly rebuild the package just like the developer did on 
> their box.

This is not always true. Some packages cannot be built in this 
fashion, for all our trying. For instance, eclipse requires that I 
download the JDK 1.4.2 and have it around to build, which 
isn't/can't be distributed in a package. I agree that we should 
avoid it whenever possible, but it still does come up.

We should definitely favor integration with pacbuild, so we need to 
hammer out the workflow-- ultimately repoman will not get used with 
pacbuild if the workflow is not natural. This is a somewhat 
secondary concern of this project, but I still think it merits 
attention during this planning step.

In some situations where you want to manage repos (like at my work), 
you don't want to have a pacbuild server; you want the flexibility 
of people being able to upload their own built packages. So no 
matter what, I think we need to build such an upload mechanism. I 
agree that pacbuild and autobuilding packages is useful, but it 
won't be the right solution for everyone, and the goal is for 
repoman to be lightweight and solve this very narrow problem for 
everyone.

- P