[pacman-dev] two patches for makepkg

[Loui Chang]

On Sat 03 Oct 2009 01:43 +0800, Ray Rashif wrote:
> 2009/10/2 huntxu <mhuntxu at gmail.com>
> > 2. let makepkg install custom license automatically
> > When making packages whose licenses are "custom", we use PKGBUILD to
> > install the license file manually. Since it is a common step for those
> > packages, why not let makepkg do that automatically?
> > Just specify $licensefile in your PKGBUILD(like $licensefile=LICENSE) and
> > ensure the license file is in $startdir, it then will be automatically
> > install to $pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/$licensefile when packaging.
> 
> I don't quite like this one. Custom licenses are not always handmade, they
> can reside somewhere in $srcdir. Even if this is an "optional" variable,
> it's sort of not really worth it.
> 
> It can be a path, or makepkg could parse $license for the word "custom" and
> look in $startdir for the file of which the name is after the colon eg.
> "custom:FOO". Can be handled many ways, but..is it worth the extra code, and
> KISS to let a variable define something which can just be scripted inside
> build() easily?

Awhile ago I was thinking about how we could actually link the license
name to the license text. We could get rid of the 'custom' usage and
just do something like this:

    license=('FOO:$srcdir/FOO.txt' 'BAR:$srcdir/BAR.txt' 'GPL')

Anything without a file specified is assumed to be common (in the
licenses package).

Anything with a file is a custom license and would be packaged
appropriately.

Extra metadata could even be added to the PKGINFO/pacmandb and licenses
could be displayed via common utilities.

That's just some brainstorming though. I don't know if such features are
really that valuable. I tend to dislike unnecessary features.