automated PPL

[Daniel Reed]

I am going to start testing a new script to pull out package proposals from
cygwin-apps messages. I have a couple small requests that hopefully will not
be too intrusive.

For messages about only one package, you can simply follow the message
formatting guidelines Christopher Faylor proposed for cygwin-announce in
September:
	http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2003-09/msg00355.html
Or even more simply, whenever you mention the name of your package, include
its version number.


What I need, before any set of URLs, is the package name and version number,
separated by a space or hyphen. It does not need to be immediately before
the URLs, just "close", as in:

	I am pleased to announce the availability of bar 2.0 from:
	BINARY: http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.0-1.tar.bz2
	HINT: http://example.net/~doe/setup.hint
	SOURCE: http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.0-1-src.tar.bz2

The word "version" can appear between the package name and the version
number, so "... of bar version 2.0 from" would also be fine.


What *will* muck things up, however, are references to other packages, as in:

	I am pleased to announce the availability of bar 2.0, which depends
	on having cygwin 1.5.5 installed, from:
	BINARY: http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.0-1.tar.bz2

Please make sure your package and its version are the last things that
"look" like a package/version pair before the URLs. To clarify, you can
certainly include whatever language you want, just make sure to state (or
restate) the package name and version before its URL, as in:

	I am pleased to announce the availability of bar 2.0, which depends
	on having cygwin 1.5.5 installed. bar-2.0 is available from:
	BINARY: http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.0-1.tar.bz2


If you are announcing a package with subordinate packages (any package built
from the sources of a master package), list the master first and do not list
a -src for the subordinate package. Subordinate packages do not need a
version number*; the version of the master is always used. For example:

	I have updated Cygwin's libfoo package at the following URLs:

	libfoo-1.2-3
	============
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/libfoo-1.2-3-src.tar.bz2
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/libfoo-1.2-3.tar.bz2
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/setup.hint-libfoo

	libfoo-devel
	============
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/libfoo-devel-1.2-3.tar.bz2
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/setup.hint-libfoo-devel

	libfoo-demo
	===========
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/libfoo-demo-1.2-3.tar.bz2
	http://www.example.com/Cygwin/libfoo/setup.hint-libfoo-demo


* I still need some way to identify the names of subordinate packages,
  though. If the subordinate package contains the name of the master package
  (like how libfoo-devel contains "libfoo", and "libotcl0" contains "otcl"),
  it will be found. Otherwise, you may have to put a dummy version string
  after the sub-package name so it will be found.


The simplest message would include the package name in the Subject and just
URLs in the body, as in:
	Subject: Updated: bar-2.1

	New version, please upload.

	http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.1-1.tar.bz2
	http://example.net/~doe/bar-2.1-1-src.tar.bz2
	http://example.net/~doe/bar.hint


Hint files should contain the word "hint"; source files should contain
"-src"; binary files should at least contain ".tar". You can end files in
.tar.zip or .tar.txt if your web server requires it, but make sure they are
actually bzip2'd tar files, as they will be renamed to .tar.bz2 when
uploaded.


Also, please try not to let your mailer break up URLs into multiple lines,
as in:
	ftp://ftp.example.com/pub/users/john.doe/non-work/Cygwin/libfoo-1.2-
	3-src.tar.bz2
Going beyond the 80th column is fine.


I have run the past two months' proposal messages through and it has been
nearly perfect. The misses were:
	curl (believed the package was "have"),
	gv (uses "setup" instead of "hint"),
	opengl (believes the version is "1.4-1", which is probably my fault),
	otcl 1.0.13 (did not list updated URLs for its subordinates),
	suite3270 (just not the expected order of URLs), and
	tcp-wrappers (written as "TCP Wrappers" instead of "tcp-wrappers").

cabextract, cweb, fltk, fontconfig, gsl, joe, lftp 2.6.8-1, lftp 2.6.8-2,
lftp 2.6.8-3, otcl 1.0.9, rdesktop, rxp, sunrpc, tclcl, tzcode, wget, wtf,
and xmlto were all parsed correctly. I will be running those messages
through the new script to regenerate the PPL (I seem to have kept messing up
poor Harold's messages :/).


Thanks for reading through. If you have any questions or concerns, please
feel free to comment.

-- 
Daniel Reed <n@ml.org>	http://naim-users.org/nmlorg/	http://naim.n.ml.org/
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to
do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling
with them while they do it. -- Theodore Roosevelt