Just some of my personal observations of the current woof-CE.
1. It’s much faster than the woof version I used circa 2013.
2. It appears that only the dependencies for distro compatible versions are listed. Pet files no longer list their dependencies. This looks to be what is used to distinguish between, say, a DEB file and a PET file. I’d like the PET files to also have their dependencies declared in the same manner. Perhaps another field should be added to disclose whether or not a packages is, for example, a DEB or a PET file (or whatever compatible distro is used other than DEB). If one were to make a script or program to allow someone to choose files to include in the build (GUI, for example), they’d have to manually hunt down PET dependencies in order to do so. And that’d be a royal pain in the ass. If the goal is to make this accessible, then you have to make it accessible. Obfuscating the dependencies doesn’t lend itself to accessibility. The person compiling the PET knows the dependencies, so list them. Don’t play games. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Remember, it’s supposed to be about accessibility, isn’t it?
3. I could be totally off base with this one, but at least hear me out. While woof is certainly faster than in days of old, the current bottleneck is the downloading of packages. Perhaps instead of using bash script, the download functionality should be done in golang.
4. Another thing that would be nice is that instead of yes| and no| for including/excluding packages, just add support for # comments from the beginning of the line (and retain them at the end of the line as they already are). If you want a package included, it’s declared. If not, it’s commented out (yes| no| could be removed). This would also allow comments (and comment blocks) within the declarations. Some of the lines are so long that comments are a royal pain to find. It’d also allow a developer to group things (base packages, desktop, libraries, etc.) under a comment block. It’d allow the developer a more concise way of explaining what the hell they’re doing.
5. This thread should be more visible. Not my thread, but the woof-CE thread. It should be very visible, and not hidden and hard to locate. It should be out there and obvious to all. It should be promoted.