Package Details: xidel 0.9.9.20230617.8842.e14a96920e01-1

Git Clone URL: https://aur.archlinux.org/xidel.git (read-only, click to copy)
Package Base: xidel
Description: A command line tool to download and extract data from html/xml pages
Upstream URL: http://videlibri.sourceforge.net/xidel.html
Licenses: GPL
Submitter: levitsky
Maintainer: levitsky
Last Packager: levitsky
Votes: 18
Popularity: 0.002676
First Submitted: 2014-11-24 20:39 (UTC)
Last Updated: 2023-08-19 22:22 (UTC)

Latest Comments

m040601 commented on 2024-02-15 04:08 (UTC) (edited on 2024-02-15 04:55 (UTC) by m040601)

Some notes to everyone, and a call to action to the maintainer of this "xidel" PKGBUILD

  • Xidel hasnt seen a proper release in more than 6 years.
The last official release is Xidel 0.9.8, but a Xidel 0.9.9 development version is published
irregularly for Windows, Linux (>= Ubuntu 20.10), Android and Windows, Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) and
Mac as a preview for the next release. It is recommended to use the 0.9.9 version, since it
contains bug fixes, is more performant, and partially supports XPath/XQuery 3.1. Thereby most of
the JSONiq syntax has been replaced by the XPath 3.1 JSON syntax. It will be published
officially, once all of XPath/XQuery 3.1 is implemented.

I, personally, find that confusing and unecessary.

He also maintains a couple of "mirrors"

The source history is stored in a mercurial repository together with the VideLibri source and
dependencies, licensed as GPLv3+. There are mirrors on GitHub Build status and GitLab. These
mirrors have the Xidel source only, in order to compile it you need to download the dependencies
from their own repositories first. Or use the above source tarball, which also contains

Again, in my personal opinion, frankenstein confusing mirrors, https://gitlab.com/benito/xidel, https://github.com/benibela/xidel/

Arch users who do want to use xidel and do insist on building from source, can always use,

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xidel-git

Remember that modern xml and html parsing is a complicated task and can be a security risk.

Anyway, and since I am also in need for a tool like xidel, these might be worthy considering. There are many other well maintained, official, modern alternatives, that can do similarj job

Official packages, "htmlq", "hq", and the classics "xmlstarlet" and "xmllint (libxml2).

On the AUR, "pup" (used to be official) etc....

levitsky commented on 2023-08-19 22:28 (UTC) (edited on 2023-08-19 22:29 (UTC) by levitsky)
....
...  I merge this one into xidel-bin?
....

@levitsky why havent you done this yet ?

It is only confusing users.

You either,

Merge your "xidel" PKGBUILD with the "xidel-bin" PKGBUILD. And start collaborating with fbrennan. And remove your "xidel" from the AUR.

Or,

you do keep your "xidel", but you do the work to turn it into a real "build from source" PKGBUILD.

Your are indeed the first one to have ever made a xidel in the AUR:

AUR URL                       : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xidel-bin
First Submitted               : Mon 24 Nov 2014 08:39:10 PM WET
Maintainer                    : levitsky

AUR URL                       : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xidel-bin
First Submitted               : Thu 12 Nov 2020 05:32:46 PM WET
Maintainer                    : fbrennan

But fbrennan then later, took the name "xidel-bin". That's the name you should have chosen in 2014.

Your PKGBUILD "xidel" was always wrongly named.

It is not a package that downloads a released source archive https://...tar.gz version and then compiles it. It is a package that downloads a released precompiled binary https://..tar.gz and just simply copies it to /usr/bin.

It should never have been named "xidel" in the first place.

This is according to the AUR guidelins in the wiki (xyz, xyz-git, xyz-bin etc)

Please collaborate , and avoid reduplicating efforts. Instead of confusing Arch users.

Thanks in advance.

FabioLolix commented on 2023-08-19 22:45 (UTC)

Hello Lev thanks for your reply, orphan request revoked, it is quite late for me now, we'll discuss in the next days, for the moment leave the things as they are :)

levitsky commented on 2023-08-19 22:28 (UTC) (edited on 2023-08-19 22:29 (UTC) by levitsky)

@FabioLolix Sorry for not responding to your comment earlier. I was looking at sourceforge downloads and didn't find the sources there. Also I was using the checksums sourceforge provided because that seemed more reliable than generating my own.

I see I can start building from Github but the author doesn't mark these "nightly" 0.9.9 releases there in any way so then it would make sense to do it in a -git package? As far as I understand, xidel stopped at 0.9.8 officially.

Given the above and your orphan request, I suggest that maybe you just submit a xidel-git package and I merge this one into xidel-bin?

FabioLolix commented on 2023-05-13 12:50 (UTC)

Hello,

  • please build from source
  • please use sha256sums or higher (sha512sums, b2sums) for hash check

iegubkin commented on 2021-06-24 03:08 (UTC)

Xidel 0.9.9 (20210529.7880.e0cb7e033b4b) is broken: https://github.com/benibela/xidel/issues/70

xidel-0.9.9.20210620.7908.1f19357dcdf2 has been released.

chovy commented on 2021-01-29 21:09 (UTC)

new version 0.9.9