[aur-general] [HEADS-UP] Meta data and split package support in the AUR

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 at 12:37:19, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> Am 05.04.2014 14:38, schrieb Lukas Fleischer:
> > AUR 3.0.0 will be able to read metadata from source packages. These
> > metadata will be read from a file called .AURINFO (contained in the
> > source tarball). Dave wrote several tools [1], including mkaurball which
> > can be used to automatically build a source tarball with metadata so you
> > don't need to worry about creating this file on your own.
> 
> What is the reason that such metadata cannot be generated with `makepkg
> --source`? We would need to call it .METAINFO or so instead of .AURINFO,
> but otherwise I don't see why we need yet another tool for it.

As I wrote in the original email, it is one of our goals to get this
feature integrated into makepkg(8).

It hasn't been implemented in makepkg from day one since pacman requires
the format to be very general and cover a lot of corner cases. As no one
was interested to implement this with all its subtleties all at once,
our idea was to develop a format gradually. The very first
implementation (which has been supported by the AUR for a couple of
months) only supported very few fields, with zero support for split
packages. Dave extended this format and I implemented the required
changes in the AUR backend. It should not be too much work to merge
Dave's tool into makepkg and rename the file once it is mature enough;
in the meantime, the AUR will serve as a testbed for both the format and
the implementation.