andrewchambers
commented
4 years ago I think we could add some sort of :meta key to the package constructor in hermes. Individual package repos can then decide what metadata is actually valuable.
The metadata would probably be carried into the .hpkginfo.jdn file.
Would it be possible to add some metadata to the packages, that could ideally be possible to extract automatically in future? Esp. fields like "description" and "license"? For example, browsing through the packages I have no slightest idea what "libbsd" is, so I have to start googling around and searching for info, for every one of the packages I can't recognize/guess. I found any kind of even short desc very helpful in nixpkgs.
If you can help me understand what might be the best way to add those, I might be interested to try and schedule a bit of time to add at least the "description" info to as many existing packages as I'll be able. Given the fact that the current size of the repo is still relatively small, there's non-zero chance I might even be able to add it to all of them.
If you're ok with the general idea, my personal proposal would be to not split the description to two fields ("short" and "long"), just to specify a git-commit-like format, where the first line is a short desc, then maybe an empty line, then optionally some longer desc. Though that's just an idea. (I was initially even thinking about making this "the first sentence is the short desc", but a "sentence" might be hard to extract - taking
". "as boundary would still risk stumbling over in-sentence shortcuts like e.g. in "Alien vs. Predator.")