[pacman-dev] Obscurity in pacman.conf.5 man page

[Mario Blättermann]

Hello Eli,

Am Fr., 5. Juli 2019 um 22:59 Uhr schrieb Eli Schwartz
<eschwartz at archlinux.org>:
>
> On 7/5/19 4:44 PM, Mario Blättermann wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I stumbled upon the following sentence in pacman.conf.5:
> >
> >     repo-add /home/pkgs/custom.db.tar.gz /home/pkgs/*.pkg.tar.gz
> >
> >       The above command will generate a compressed database named
> >       /home/pkgs/custom.db.tar.gz. Note that the database must be of the form
> >       defined in the configuration file and {ext} is a valid compression type
> >       as documented in repo-add(8).
> >
> > Although the example database name has the static extension ».gz« (which is
> > currently used in Archlinux' Pacman), the following explanation mentions
> > {ext} as a variable for the file extension. If this targets to use cases of
> > Pacman in other distributions which possibly use a different extension, then
> > the man page should explain this more detailed.
>
> It has nothing to do with other distributions. You can create a custom
> repository for personal use using whichever extension you like, too. If
> you truly wish to know how repo-add works, though, you should be reading
> the repo-add.8 man page.
>
> pacman.conf.5 merely mentions one example use and explicitly tells you
> which other man page you need to read.
>
But the file name /home/pkgs/custom.db.tar.gz is confusing. Should be rather
/home/pkgs/custom.db.tar.{ext}. With the current file name, readers
think that the
extension is hard coded to »gz«, and the following explanation speaks about
»ext« which is nowhere to see in the file name.

Best Regards,
Mario