Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2000/04/09/01:54:55
On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Laurynas Biveinis wrote:
> Eli, could
> you look through DSMs which I've sent for you? If particular package
> is the prime victim, could you add 'depends-on: djtzn' at the end of binary
> DSM?
I looked through the DSMs, made a DSM file for Make 3.79, and I have
several comments about the DSM spec as a side-effect.
1) It is not clear how to put more than a single value into a
directive. For example, there might be more than one author of a
given package for the `author', `author-email' and other related
directives. Similarly, `depends-on' and `requires' might need more
than a single value. How should one go about doing this?
2) The fine difference between `depends-on' and `requires' is not
clear, because ``functions properly'' and ``functionality may be
impaired'' are ambiguous. If the intent is that `requires' is any
requirements without which the package will not work at all, then
the spec should say so.
Example DSM files that Laurynas sent me don't help here, because
they fail to mention any non-trivial dependencies. For example,
diff's -l switch needs pr.exe, several of Emacs commands won't work
without ispell, man, Grep, diff, and other programs, etc. All
these aren't mentioned, so it is hard to understand the intent of
`depends-on'.
3) It seems like the spec is heavily slated towards installing a
package, because some of the directives required for uninstalling
are missing. For example, a script and/or command to run when
uninstalling would be a good idea (e.g., to run install-info to
remove the entry from info/DIR).
4) I think we need a `current-maintainer' directive and the associated
`current-maintainer-email', because the current maintainer might be
someone different from the original author. This is the case with
many GNU packages.
5) To have a useful partition using the `group' directive, we need a
list of standard groups. We also need to address the possibility
that some packages would want to belong to more than a single
group.
6) It is not clear what do we ned to put under `mailing-list',
`newsgroup', and related directives. Are these for reporting
problems in DJGPP ports, general discussions about the package, or
something else, like discussing the package internals?
In general, any given package will typically have several relevant
mailing lists and/or news groups, in addition to
comp.os.msdos.djgpp where they all can be discussed. So we need
clear guidelines about what to put there. Or perhaps we need to
have several different directives for the different types of
forums.
7) Perhaps the installer and uninstaller should automatically run
install-info with the appropriate arguments (these arguments are
pretty standard). This way, people won't need to put these
commands into the DSM files, which is error-prone.
- Raw text -