On 08/06/12 17:31, Aaron DeVore wrote:
Many other distros contain such functions. From what I've seen, the functions can help make packages more concise and less error prone.
I will be taking a university course in open source software development over the summer. We need to pick a project to work on during the course. Would adding utility functions to makepkg/PKGBUILDs be acceptable to Arch?
So... I am all for reducing duplication of code, but have been quite wary of implementing this (there are _OLD_ bug reports about this in the tracker). The advantage of the PKGBUILD system is that you do not have to learn a language to implement a package. If you can build a package, you can easily create a PKGBUILD for it. Adding a library would not stop this (you can still build with the full commands), but it would lead to PKGBUILDs that required more than some basic bash knowledge to read. I think that disadvantage outweighs any advantage from adding a library to makepkg. Now I never like to send a potential contributor away. So have a look at the bug tracker and wiki as see if there is something else you would be interested in and let us know. I am sure we can help you get going on it. Allan