[poky] Package Summary and Description's for "world"

Mark Hatle mark.hatle at windriver.com
Wed Feb 2 16:07:21 PST 2011


Attached is a gzip'ed CSV (comma separated file) file of all of the summary and
descriptions for all of the package produced by the system, when configured for
qemuarm.  (There may be a few things here and there for other architectures, but
this should be almost everything.)

I'm sending this in hopes that people will start to review packages and send me
updates (or better yet send the list patches) for the SUMMARY and DESCRIPTION
fields.

While you look this over, let me explain how these fields are generated.  (Note,
the description below and the CSV is based on a patch I sent a pull request for
earlier today.)

First what is the purpose of the SUMMARY and DESCRIPTION fields.  The SUMMARY is
supposed to be a 1-line (72 character or less normally) description of what the
package does.  The DESCRIPTION is a more verbose, multiline, description of what
the package does, what software may be included and other information that a
user may find useful in determining if they need that package for some reason.

In the bitbake.conf file, there is a set of defaults that define SUMMARY and
DESCRIPTION for each package, as well as the default for each automatically
generated package split.

The package wide defaults are:

SUMMARY = "[Package Name] version [Package Version]-[Package Release]"
DESCRIPTION = "[SUMMARY]"

Each recipe may override these defaults, and provide their own versions.  Most
of the packages in the system do provide customer DESCRIPTION files, but not
everything provides a custom SUMMARY.  So if you see examples in this format, it
means the recipe is missing a SUMMARY, and/or DESCRIPTION.

By default the packages are split into "[name]", "[name]-dbg", "[name]-dev",
"[name]-doc", and "[name]-locale-[locale]" packages.  For each of these a
default, based on the package wide summary/description is provided:

SUMMARY_[NAME] = "[SUMMARY]"
DESCRIPTION_[NAME] = "[DESCRIPTION]"

SUMMARY_[NAME]-dbg = "[SUMMARY] - Debugging files"
DESCRIPTION_[NAME]-dbg = "[DESCRIPTION]  This package contains ELF symbols and
related sources for debugging purposes."

SUMMARY_[NAME]-dev = "[SUMMARY] - Development files"
DESCRIPTION_[NAME]-dev = "[DESCRIPTION]  This package contains symbolic links,
static binaries, header files, and related items necessary for software
development."

SUMMARY_[NAME]-doc = "[SUMMARY] - Documentation files"
DESCRIPTION_[NAME]-doc = "[DESCRIPTION] - This package contains documentation."

SUMMARY_[NAME]-locale-[locale] = "[SUMMARY] - [locale] translations"
DESCRIPTION_[NAME]-locale-[locale] = "[DESCRIPTION]  This package contains
language translation files for the [locale] locale."

as with the package wide summary and description, these can also be overridden
within each recipe.  As recipes add additional package-splits they should
provide custom summary and descriptions for those as well, if ones are not
selected the package wide version is used.

As mentioned above, comments, suggestions and patches definitely welcome!
--Mark
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