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From: | Paul Kienzle |
Subject: | Re: packaging aesthetics |
Date: | Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:24:19 -0500 |
On Feb 14, 2007, at 11:57 AM, Søren Hauberg wrote:
David Bateman skrev:Name (and possibly version) could come from the file name (e.g. image-1.0.0.tar.gz). The rest are mainly of interest in generating web pages, RPM packages , etc. So perhaps the DESCRIPTION file could just be required for packages in octave-forge?Ok, so if the goal is just to make the package installation of a bunch of m-files easier, then keeping the existing package structure andallowing a bunch of m-files package should be possible. The issue I seeis that we currently have two required files. The first is theDESCRIPTION which is the packaging information and the second COPYING is the license for the code. Do we relax that requirement? If so, how do weget the required fields of DESCRIPTION (Name, Version, Date, Author, Maintainer, Title, Description)?We could remove the need for the COPYING file. I would prefer if we could educate people on the need of licenses, but it's a though fight. Most of the matlab code on the web doesn't have a license, so if we don't require the COPYING file we would appeal to the matlab crowd.The easiest, would be to allow a package with a bunch of m-files and a COPYING and DESCRIPTION file. Is that compromise enough?I should note that I'm not a fan of not requiring DESCRIPTION and COPYING, but it would be possible.
DESCRIPTION could be useful for installed packages, for example to provide a one-line description of the package when listing all installed packages, or an extended description of a particular package. I can also imagine some uses for a programmatically available version number. Requiring a one-line license name would also be convenient. The complete text of the license is certainly required for redistribution from an archive, but I don't think you want to clutter up DESCRIPTION with it, and sticking it in COPYING is as good as any other.
Requiring these two files in the package root seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Matlab used to do some of this with the contents.m file. I don't know the current practice.
- Paul
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