On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 08:11:38PM +0200, Klaus Heinz wrote:
> How do people think about keeping a simple list of interesting tidbits
> about a package in the package directory itself?
> 
> The information would get updated by the developer working on the
> package with a new make target ("make pkginfo").
> 
> To get an overview about all the packages we would only need to
> extract the lists and concatenate them. No more need to simulate a
> make process with perl, just let the developers use the real make in a
> decentralised manner.
> 
> Maybe we could abuse the distinfo file, which already contains the
> generated checksums, to keep this information.

I think the key is to minimize duplication.  any extra magic files a
maintainer has to maintain are inadvertently going to fall out of sync
one time or another simply by accident.

maybe a better way to go about this would be to have finer grained
makefiles in each directory, with some way at the top-level to .include
all of these fragments so a single non-recursive make run at the top
level could print tuples and generate master dependencies?  the
individual Makefiles in each subdirectory would also include these so
the build system would continue to work as the vast majority of people
expect it to...

now where did I put that package of infinite time?

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com