Expanding on NO_ROOT: Categorizing installed files

[Sean Fagan]

On Jul 16, 2014, at 10:07 AM, Brooks Davis <brooks at freebsd.org> wrote:

> The vast majorify of the diff is make debugging garbage that looks like
> it was committed by accident.  I won't provided any detailed review
> of the current patch except to say that there are a lot of apparently
> redundent instances of setting META_CATEGORY in Makefiles and still
> quite a lot of instances of .EXPORTVAR: META_CATEGORY.

There were ten.  I've removed those (and the make debug out, and
a stray .orig file, grrr), and am testing now.  That'll take a while ;).

>> I have not changed it from having a new "category=" to using "tag="; I looked at that, and don't think it's the best way to go, but am still looking.
> 
> Given that the current use of tags= is basically unconsumed, I still
> don't understand why.

First, because the space is limited -- it's not "tag type=value", but "tag=value".  So if there is a category of "debug", that conflicts with a tag of "debug."  And similarly for any other tags.

Second, because "category=" isn't the only keyword I might want to add here -- I would prefer that the metalog be considered a key-value sequence, and any consumer should simply ignore any key it doesn't understand.

(Consider checksums, as a semi-obvious example of one that can be put in place by install.)

Combine the two, and I'm very wary of it -- it puts a limitation in, when it should be extensible.

Sean.