[pacman-dev] [PATCH v2] doc: Add a man page describing PKGINFO

[Andrew Gregory]

On 06/29/19 at 11:18pm, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> On 6/28/19 2:55 PM, Jelle van der Waa wrote:
> > From: Jelle van der Waa <jelle at archlinux.org>
> > 
> > Describe the PKGINFO format which resides in a package produced makepkg.
> As mentioned on IRC, there's a lot of duplication with the PKGBUILD
> fields, so I'd feel better if we could somehow document just a list of
> fields and say that their contents are derived from the PKGBUILD(5) meaning.
> 
> The PKGINFO manpage should just describe the format of the file (as
> given in the suggested synopsis) and pointers to where the relevant
> metadata comes from.
> 
> Some PKGINFO keys are specific to the built package, e.g. size,
> builddate, or mean something different, like arch/pkgver -- we should
> document why and how they differ.

This is low-level documentation.  If we're going to document the file
format, we should document it as libalpm sees it, not just the flavor
that makepkg generates.  For example, all of the dependency fields,
that includes provides, replaces, and conflicts, can have an optional
description even though makepkg doesn't allow one.  There are only
a handful of fields that actually map directly.