[pacman-dev] [PATCH] makepkg: Add '--nocompress' syntactic sugar

[Jouke Witteveen]

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 10:01 PM Eli Schwartz <eschwartz at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 5/19/19 3:52 PM, Jouke Witteveen wrote:
> > However, I do now think that it would maybe have been good to make
> > PKGEXT=.pkg.tar
> > the default in makepkg.conf, since local installation of AUR packages
> > is probably the most common usecase of makepkg.
> >
> > Changing it now makes no sense as it will probably be too disruptive.
> > The comment ("Do not modify unless [etc.]") could be improved to
> > something more helpful, though.
>
> That is a very interesting point. Would you like to submit a patch
> modifying the manpage to suggest using .pkg.tar "if you want to disable
> compression"?

Sure, but it is not clear to me what it should say exactly.

Currently it says:

----
       PKGEXT=".pkg.tar.gz", SRCEXT=".src.tar.gz"
           Sets the compression used when making compiled or source packages.
           Valid suffixes are .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tar.lzo,
           .tar.lrz, and .tar.Z. Do not touch these unless you know what you
           are doing.
----

The first line is likely wrong, since it suggests .gz may be the
default compression. This was not even the case when the line was
added, nine years ago [1]!
Then there is the last sentence. It is a bit weird to end this
paragraph with "Use .tar to disable compression. Do not touch these
unless you know what you are doing." Perhaps something like "Use .tar
if you want to disable compression. Do not set these to a compression
method other than the default unless you know what you are doing." is
better. On the other hand, maybe the whole "...unless you know what
you are doing." is a bit too strong anyway, and can simply be dropped.

I think it is best to mirror whatever the manpage is going to say in
/etc/makepkg.conf.

Sorry to make this a bigger fuzz than it deserves. Feel free to simply
change the text as you see fit if you think that is easier than
waiting for a patch from me.

Regards,
- Jouke

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21302