On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Dave Reisner <d@falconindy.com> wrote: <snip>
- Every variable (pkgver, depends, etc) is preceded by ($pkgname).
I don't like this. Why surround it with parenthesis? pacman in git is already fairly strict about what it allows in pkgname=, so if you're going to advertise this columnar format, I'd say just leave it untouched. (i.e. pkgname="foo bar" won't get past makepkg). The extra characters wrapping the name just makes parsing a little more tedious.
My mistake, you are correct parentheses are unneeded thanks to the strictness of makepkg. <snip>
As a counter example, what about the following. Similar to how we do the pacman DBs, each package is a "field", e.g.
%PACKAGE% pkgname = boost pkgver = 1.50.0 depends = boot-libs=1.50.0 ...
%PACKAGE% pkgname = boost-libs pkgver = 1.50.0 depends = icu depends = zlib depends = bzip2 ...
Each section is delimited with a blank line, with the field name telling the parser ahead of time what sort of data to expect next.
I do think there is a certain nicety to my proposal where any random line can be parsed and the parser can know the package name and the variable declaration from that single line. I like your proposal as well though, and would be more than happy with it. Thanks for your response Dave. Regards, Jason