setup.ini, setup.hint, and update-setup

[Charles Wilson]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 05:20:42PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
> >While setup.exe can handle multi-line "ldesc" entries in setup.ini, the
> >update-setup script used to generate that file from the setup.hint's
> >will not create the correct results if the hint file has a multi-line
> >ldesc entry.
> >
> >Question:
> >
> >There are two ways to address this, that I can see:
> >  1) fix update-setup to deal with multi-line entries
> >  2) require that all entries fit on a single line -- but it can be
> >very long...
> >
> >I'm all for #2.  Comments?
> 
> I have a corollary question.  Can setup.exe deal with multi-line
> ldesc's?  If not then we need to do some variation of 2.

As Earnie pointed out, I've already tested this.  It works.

> 
> >Oh, and one other thing: update-setup doesn't parse the "category" or
> >"requires" entry from the hint file.
> 
> Right.  I mentioned this a while ago and Robert submitted a patch for
> this but, frankly, I am not really looking for update-setup patches.

Okay.  It doesn't really matter *right now* -- since the currently
distributed setup.exe doesn't care about "category" and "requires" at
all.

> I'm not going to guarantee that update-setup is around for the long haul.
> That's one reason why it is not publicly available.

Okay.....so what do you see as the long term solution for setup.ini?  A
file in winsup CVS that's copied over to the webserver, and we update it
by hand whenever we upload a new package?

Or a database of the "constant" stuff -- requires, category, ldesc,
sdesc.  Then the version info is computed on-the-fly or from setup.hints
and the data is merged into a setup.ini?

Or an executable version of update-setup that uses a similar
lex-generated parser to the one used by setup.exe (the grammar of a
setup.hint is *slightly* different than the grammer of setup.ini,
but...)?

Or a new package standard so that the tarballs are self-documenting
(like rpm)?  (e.g. "tarball must contain a "package.desc" file at the
top level")

(I'm just brainstorming here, feel free to bitbucket without reply).

--Chuck