[pacman-dev] [RFC] Introduce pkgsuffix to PKGBUILD spec

[Dave Reisner]

Hi,

I've been parsing a large number of PKGBUILDs recently, and in doing so,
learned a lot about how people misuse PKGBUILDs. One case in particular
that intrigues me is the core/linux PKGBUILD in Arch[1] which uses code
generation to create the package_* functions. This is mainly done for the
purposes of making users' lives easier, as they have fewer changes they
need to maintain. On the other hand, this makes the PKGBUILD far harder
to parse, and perhaps arguably harder to read.

I thought about how else this could be solved and came up with the
idea of introducing a 'pkgsuffix' variable in the PKGBUILD spec. The
name should make it obvious as to what it does -- for any package
defined in the PKGBUILD, append $pkgsuffix to the name. I've already
written an initial patch for makepkg which ends up being quite simple.

Implementation details:

The suffix should be as transparent as possible. The only time the full
with-suffix names appear is in the final package output (tarball name
and .PKGINFO). That means packages (when referenced via the --pkg flag)
will still be the non-suffixed name.

Source packages are a little trickier. I can imagine cases for including
or excluding the suffix in the tarball name, but I went with the
exclusion route. Note that the pkgname portion of the source tarball
name is somewhat insignificant, as you could have pkgbase=voltron,
pkgname=daibazaal, and the source tarball name would be voltron.
Appending the suffix is, IMO, equally insigificant since the suffix
applies to the output package names, not the pkgbase.

Something that surfaced early in testing is a question about
dependencies. My patch currently implicitly adds provides and conflicts
for the pkgname sans-suffix. I think that there's a lot more cases where
this is the right, rather than wrong, thing to do. At the moment, these
added dependencies are unversioned.

Thoughts?

d

[1] https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/linux#n353