On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah I've thought about this as well. Source packages could have a similar format as binary packages with a .PKGINFO file to present the metadata in an easily parsable format.
You can read some of my incomplete brainstormings here: http://louipc.mine.nu/arch/%5BRFC%5D-PKGINFO-in-srctargz
Ah, that's great, never heard of that before ! A few comments : - using the PKGINFO format sounds like a good idea, but not sure why you want to keep the same name. As you noticed yourself, this would cause stupid problems like a possible confusion between source and package tarballs. Better just call it SRCINFO, so pacman will never be confused. - for split pkgbuilds and arch , well... Maybe it would be simpler to write as many SRCINFO as there are PKGINFO/packages , i.e. one for every combination of split name / arch. Maybe all these files could be all combined into just one, I am not sure. But I would not care about data duplication, I would rather keep it as dummy and easy to parse as possible.