Ah, I see the issue now.

Juan RP <juan@xtrarom.org> wrote on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:27:52 +0200:

> Can we please refer to the pkgsrc guide to the developers that commit
> incomplete packages? if they don't know how to make them, they shouldn't
> commit them.

We could, but in cases like this it won't do much good, for two reasons:

     1. Telling me to to look at the very file I was following when
     creating the package would make little difference (except perhaps in
     my irritation level).

     2. Advice as short as, "look at doc/packages.txt," while admirably
     succinct, confronts me a 50,000-word document (essentially, the size
     of a novel), with no real indication of where I should be looking
     and what he should be doing.

As for the implied assumption that I don't know how to make packages,
you might have a quick look at how long I've been committing to pkgsrc,
and then imagine how I might feel about such an accusation.

As for this particular situation, I got nailed by spending too much time
with gnu-configure packages and just assuming that the usual automatic
PLIST generation would work. (Is that turned on by PKG_DEVELOPER?)
Lesson learned; always check the PLIST for sanity.

But a helpful improvement might be to have pkg_lint check for an empty
PLIST, among all of its other things; that would have caught my error
before I committed. (The "@comment this plist intentionally left empty"
convention for empty PLIST files would let it know when you intend to
do that for packages that simply require a set of others for simple
installation.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@cynic.net>         +81 90 7737 2974
              http://www.starling-software.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it.    --George Bernard Shaw