Re: setup.hint documentation issues

[Jon Turney <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

On 09/02/2016 19:31, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Jon Turney writes:
>> I'd suggest that double-quoting of those keys is made mandatory, and
>> embedded double-quotes are forbidden, as this permits simpler
>> processing of this text, lexing character by character.
>
> OK, although we might need some sort of escaping in the long run.

Yes, I have no problem with later adding escaping e.g. using '\', if 
needed, since that can written with a character by character lexer.

But writing a replacement setup.hint parser, while maintaining 
bug-for-bug compatibility with the existing behaviour, requires a 
line-by-line processing with various transformations...

>> upset knows enough to omit packages which have no install tarfiles
>> (i.e. are source-only) from from setup.ini, irrespective of 'skip'.
>>
>> However, the presence of 'skip' also causes the package to be omitted
>> from the HTML package list.
>
> I could be wrong, but it seems it may have been intended to deal with
> packages that became obsolete, but the previous version was still kept.

Any package marked 'skip' is completely omitted from setup.ini, so setup 
won't do anything with it, so I don't think that can be the use for it.

>> I think cygport's behaviour has changed over time, but currently will
>> mark source-packages as 'skip', however there are several packages
>> that are source-only (e.g. attica), that are missing 'skip'.
>
> So the proposal is to remove skip or make it mandatory for source-only
> packages?

I'm not sure.  I think I tend towards removing it, since it doesn't add 
any information.

But currently cygport generates a setup.hint for source-only package 
which only contains 'skip'.  I'm not sure that's the best idea, as 
having no sdesc, etc. means we can't describe the source package.