link to Arch Linux packages in metadata?

[majewsky]

Many of the libraries listed here have packages in Arch Linux's repos. I would like to add this metadata, but before I do that, I would like to be clear on the format to use, and whether this type of metadata is desired at all.

I saw that various manifest files link to openSUSE packages, but this seems to have been discontinued in newer versions of these manifests. Maybe it was too much of a hassle to maintain this data for the various openSUSE releases. (Only packages for openSUSE 11.4 were linked.)

Arch is a rolling-release distribution, so this could be considerably easier. For libqinfinity, for instance, the following additional metadata should be sufficient:

{ ...,
    "packages": { ...,
        "archlinux": {
            "repository":   "community",
            "package_name": "libqinfinity"
        }
    }
}

[cornelius]

The packages section is meant to have the references to the packages for the specific version of the library, which is described by the release manifest. This way you get a well-defined state of the library.

But for the rolling release it would make sense to add the information about the packages to the generic manifest. I think I would not name it packages there to not confuse the version specific information with the generic information.

What about adding something like this to the generic manifest:

{
  ...
  "distributions": {
    "archlinux": {
      "repository": "community",
      "package_name": "libqinfinity"
    }
  }
}

[majewsky]

Looks good to me.

[cornelius]

Cool. So to make use of it we would need to do two things: Add the meta data to the manifests and implement and add distribution support for ArchLinux to actually install the packages.