[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #56368] pkg: fully support field names in DESCRIPTION with hyphens

[Mike Miller]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56368>

                 Summary: pkg: fully support field names in DESCRIPTION with
hyphens
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: mtmiller
            Submitted on: Tue 21 May 2019 05:45:07 PM PDT
                Category: Octave Function
                Severity: 1 - Wish
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Feature Request
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: dev
        Operating System: Any

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Details:

It would be nice if the 'pkg' command and its subcommands allow package
metadata field names to include hyphens. As of today on the default branch,
they are partially supported, but if a field with a hyphen is present, it will
silently break loading the cache of installed packages.

Example DESCRIPTION file:


Name: foo
Version: 1.0.0
Date: 2019-05-21
Author: A U Thor
Maintainer: A U Thor
Title: Foo
Description: An example package
Custom-Field: This field should be allowed


The last line is a custom metadata field that currently breaks all installed
packages. The 'pkg install' subcommand works correctly, the package does get
installed properly and all of its metadata fields do get written to the
package cache (local list) file.

However, because the subcommands 'pkg describe', 'pkg list', 'pkg load', and
others use the 'load' command, all field names are required to be valid Octave
identifiers. The load error is silently suppressed, and it simply looks like
no packages are installed.

To resolve this, we should probably have better validation of the field names
in the DESCRIPTION file, and possibly transform unsupported characters into
underscores if it keeps things easy. We could also error on definitely invalid
field names, but I would like to specifically support hyphen separated names.

It would be even nicer to support field names as written without transforming
them, but that would probably require a custom load command to parse the
package cache file.




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