Second "RFC" on pkg-data idea for ports

[Eivind Eklund]

Please keep me in the Cc: list - I don't normally read ports@

On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 11:40:59PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> The basic idea is to collapse many of the separate files for a
> port into a single pkg-data file.  The web pages explain why I
> think this might be worth doing.  Please check them out at:
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~gad/PkgData/

There are two issues I immediately see (just to keep in mind during
development):
(1) The ability to do annotations and diffs on the patches themselves is
    fairly important.  This ability can be kept even if they are
    assembled into a single file, but it requires that they are kept
    in a line-oriented format inside the assembled file.

(2) If you do not use XML, you don't have to use a format that is
    "XML-like" - you can use e.g. significant indentation to make the
    format easier to read and edit.  YAML (http://www.yaml.org) is an
    example of a markup format that is based on this, and gives much
    lighter (and thus easier to manually edit) markup.


The ability to re-split the port into individual files for editing takes
care of most other development issues, I think.

Eivind.