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

[Mario Blättermann]

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.

To mention, I've translated repo-add.8 into German some months ago
(for the manpages-de project), so you may assume that I've read the man
page carefully. I don't see this ambiguous {ext} there, so why not simply
write »extension« instead, to make it clearer and don't let readers search
for a variable of this name anywhere…?

Cheers,
Mario