Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: license group file format

[Marius Mauch]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:15:56 -0700
Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:

> Marius Mauch wrote:
> > Ok, as there is currently a lot of work going on for GLEP 23
> > (licese based visibility filtering aka ACCEPT_LICENSE) the topic of
> > license groups came up, in particular the way how they should be
> > (technically) defined.
> >
> > The simplest way is a line based format
> > 	<groupname> <license1> ... <licenseN>
> > however this doesn't allow for any addition of metadata (for example
> > descriptions to explain the purpose of a group), these (if wanted)
> > would have to be defined in another file. The alternative would be
> > to use a more complex file format, for example so called ini-style
> >
> > [groupname]
> > licenses=license1 license2 ... licenseN
> > description=Sample license group
> > constains_stupid_licenses=1
>
> Some way to express metadata makes sense, but ini-style doesn't fit in
> with any existing configuration format portage (in the broader sense,
> not the sys-apps/portage sense) uses (make.conf, metadata.xml, etc) --
> does it?

Well, there have been long-term plans to introduce it into portage (for
example to replace the make.conf parser which suffers from a few
limitations or to make $FEATURES more flexible), but just plans so far.
Thing is that most formats we currently have are one-dimensional
(a=b) while for this (groups with metadata) we would need something
two-dimensional (a[b]=c).

Mind that I mentioned the ini-style format just as an example (it has
the benefit that we'd get the parser for free), we're completely open
to alternatives.

Marius

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