metadata

(27-05-2020, 03:49 PM)z3bra Wrote: @sth, you bring an interesting point with your manifest file: metadata.

Which one to have ?
How to store them ?
What to do with it ?

I think the bare minimum is the name, version and list of installed files. Take out any of those and the package manager cannot do its duty. I chose to only include these for this reason. I'm however interested in hearing what you include in the manifest, and your reason for it ☺

other than the future issue of dependencies, the only important thing i include that you didn't mention are file permissions, and that's due to the way i've decided to approach setting up directories.
that being said, i've considered changing it so that all files installed go into a specific directory (like /usr/local/s3pkg/<packagename>/) and then just creating symlinks to the binaries in /usr/local/bin or something. it would probably be a good idea to do that for a 'secondary' package manager like this, to avoid potential conflicts with the system's package manager.
the alternative to that, which is what i have done, is to allow the package maintainer to choose where the files should be installed, but also to keep track of any directories created explicitly for the purposes of installing the package, so that they can be cleanly removed later without affecting parent directories. i believe that info is documented in the MANIFESTS.md file in my repo but maybe it's not too clear.

either way it comes down to an architectural decision, and there are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches :)