[pacman-dev] Libraries for makepkg

[Xavier]

Allan McRae wrote:
> What are peoples opinions on adding some libraries to makepkg that would 
> quickly achieve some common tasks 
> (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10375)?  I think this is a trade of 
> between the ease of interpretation of a single command and understanding 
> what that command actually does.  The need to import the function before 
> use makes me lean on the side of including these.
> 
> If we go for this, I would recommend some fairly strict guidelines on 
> their inclusion. e.g.
> 1) The function must be a command block in common use or have a good 
> case made for why it will be in the future.
> 2) The function must be significantly complex so that using it helps 
> with interpretation of the PKGBUILD.
> 
> I can think of one function which would save a lot of discussion around 
> here:
> create_desktop_file(<progname>, <description>, <category>)
> 

I'm always for killing code duplication, so I can't be against that idea :)
Though I also got the same feeling that gentoo ebuilds were rather magic 
and difficult to grasp.
But since just looking at the scriptlets would give you the location of 
libraries (which have to be sourced manually) to look which functions 
are available and what they do, this seems alright to me.