[aur-general] Promoting use of .AURINFO

[Lukas Fleischer]

Hi,

I think we should promote the use of .AURINFO files. Currently, only a
very small fraction of packages use it. A basic description of its
format can be found in the commit message of AUR commit 5a11373 [1].
Regardless of whether we keep that format or use something entirely
different for metadata later, it is good to have this information stored
somewhere and the format is simple enough to migrate to another format
later.

I think we should at least come up with a tiny tool to generate this
kind of metadata post-makepkg and put it into the source tarball, then
add some information to the submission section in the official AUR wiki
article [2]. Does anyone have plans to write such a tool? Did anyone
already integrate this functionality into an existing AUR uploader? If
no one steps up, I might attempt to write one on my own in a couple of
days.

I might also add a deprecation warning for source tarballs without
.AURINFO files in one of the upcoming AUR releases.

Regards,
Lukas

[1] https://projects.archlinux.org/aur.git/commit/?id=5a1137363cb358593a64e0e6d0b0adeb1a9514ff
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_User_Guidelines#Submitting_packages