View source for Fink:Major New Feature Plans:XMLish Source and Patch

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All the <code>*Source*</code>-related fields are a pain to parse, can lead to a messy .info. We could cluster all fields for a given source "item". Easy to add new features (dmalloc wants stronger checksums) without making even more of a top-level fieldname mess. 

<pre>SourceFile: <<
  Source: http://whatever
  Rename: %n-%v.tar.gz
  MD5: whatever
<<
SourceFile2: <<
  Source: http://whatever
  Rename: %n-%v.tar.gz
  MD5: whatever
<<</pre>

Easy to extend to patchfiles (for example, [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=979713&group_id=17203&atid=367203 MD5 for patchfiles] is a longstanding request).<pre>PatchFile: <<
  Source: foo.patch
  MD5: whatever
<<
PatchFile2: <<
  Source: foo-ssl.patch
  MD5: whatever
<<</pre>The full path to each file would be available as a %-exp and <code>%a</code> would be abolished. That way only files that have passed the MD5 check would be usable.

===Extensions===

* <i>vasi:</i>
:It would be nice to have a patch folder per package rather than one monster patch.
:*<i>dmacks:</i>
::This is already possible (subdirs in %a), and I expect that way would continue to work correctly with the new syntax. One can already even cluster [.info and its .patch] in its own %n subdir.

* <i>drm</i>: (on [http://sourceforge.net/support/tracker.php?aid=979713 Feature Requests Tracker])
:Make the application of the patches part of the default Patch field instead of an automatic action triggered by the mere presence of the patchfile field (whatever it's called).

* <i>vasi&dmacks</i>: (on #fink?)
:Have a "Substitutions" field in the PatchFile* that lists regexps to apply to the patchfile before applying it to the source tree. That way we can devise a clean solution to the pipefail that plagues the standard "sed ... | patch" approach.

* We should probably deprecate implicit source around the time we do this. That feature has not been used in 10.4T ever, or 10.3 or 10.2-gcc3.3 in at least a year. This is an annoying special case to support IMO...it means we need hacks like Source:none and Type:nosource instead of just treating "no source listed means there is no Source".

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[[Category: Fink|New Feature Plans XMLish Source]]
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