[aur-general] Only lower case letters?

[Xyne]

canyonknight wrote:

>IMHO, the only realistic way of ever including split packages in the
>AUR is the use of a source package metadata file. A dead easy to parse
>file within a source tarball that can give the AUR all the information
>it needs without all the bash parsing it currently attempts.

The truth is that using raw Bash to encapsulate package data was a lazy hack
that didn't consider any future needs for (secure) metadata extraction. That
only got worse with split PKGBUILDs as they bury metadata in functions so you
can't even source the PKGBUILD to get that. The real solution is not to provide
that same data redundantly in a second file but to replace PKGBUILDs with
something better. I don't think that will ever happen in Pacman because of the
work it would require.

Fwiw, it is possible. My own internal system uses JSON to store package
metadata and I just keep build and package code in a separate file. The only
limitation is all of the nasty conditional logic used to configure different
architectures, but even that can be gracefully handled with some thought and
subdictionaries in the JSON file.

One day someone will hopefully write a full bash parser that can safely extract
the data instead of quick hacks to unreliably skim the basics.