Which programs actually use INDEX? [formerly Extra fields in INDEX]

[Chris Rees]

On 19 August 2011 15:32, Chris Rees <utisoft at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm having a look at modifying INDEX to have a field at the end (to
> cause minimum breakage), but I've discovered that in a few ports there
> (6630 out of 22731) appears to be extra 'stuff' in fields past field
> 10 (which is for the first WWW: line in pkg-descr).
>

Hi all again,

After some kind and encouraging words from Mark I've had a look at
Tools/make_index script. I've hacked in support for adding a LICENSE
field to the end (patches will be sent to portmgr when properly
tested), but I'm a bit concerned about the layout and field order in
INDEX:

pkgname|portdir|prefix|comment|descrfile|maintainer|categories|

which seems fine, until we move onto the next fields:

build-dep|run-dep|WWW|extract-dep|patch-dep|fetch-dep[|license]

Clearly the extract-dep etc were added later, as an afterthought, but
the risk of tool breakage was too great.

This makes the INDEXfile horribly unintuitive to read and parse, and
I'd really like to look at at least simplifying it or tidying it up
(as well as checking edge cases where it's actually making bad
assumptions [re pkg_version]).

If anyone thinks that their ${FAVOURITE_TOOL} parses, depends on or
even looks at INDEX then please either email me or add it to the list
at [1].

Thanks,

Chris

[1] http://wiki.freebsd.org/Index

-- 
Chris Rees          | FreeBSD Developer
crees at FreeBSD.org   | http://people.freebsd.org/~crees