[pacman-dev] [RFC] Generation of a .SRCINFO file for source packages

[canyonknight at gmail.com]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:

<snip>

>> Previous proposal:
>> The idea of generating a .SRCINFO file was previously proposed on the
>> mailing list [1]. No format was ever agreed upon and discussion died
>> off when no fixes were sent based off of developer suggestions. I've
>> included my own proposed format to fuel discussion and maybe reach an
>> ideal format.
>
> I am composing this offline so have not gone back through the old
> posts...  but I thought the main issue was that the split package
> variables are not defined until running the package_* functions.  I.e.
> we do not know the values of any overridden values unless we actually
> build the package.
>
> This is the main issue that needs solved.
>

I believe the previously sent patch [1] was able to extract override
values set within a package_* function. I think one of the bigger
issues may have been related to values that are set for a specific
architecture. I'll rebase the old patch and play around with it to see
what the issues are.

<snip>

> So much duplication!  How about just:
>
> pkgbase = boost
> ... (all global values) ...
>
> pkgname = boost
> ... (overrides for boost) ...
>
> pkgname = boost-libs
> ... (overrides for boost-libs) ...
>

I'm not a huge fan of having global values in a .SRCINFO file. A
.SRCINFO parser would have to process globals and then override them
where appropriate, rather than processing all values directly. There
is more duplication when global values aren't used, but it makes it
dead simple for whatever parses the .SRCINFO file. Are globals
something you would absolutely want in a .SRCINFO file?

Regards,

Jason

[1] http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2010-August/011462.html