* David Golden <x...@xdg.me> [2016-02-27 13:25]: > The more interesting question is "why are we using META for installation"
Because we can’t go back in time and make historical versions of EUMM/MB *not* use META for installation. End of line. > If the problem is with MYMETA, I have no problem having MYMETA strip > out everything but absolutely essential fields – but then affected > users have to upgrade their EU::MM/M::B, which is no better than > having them upgrade their JSON parser, so I don't think it's worth the > effort to do so. But can we get to a situation where nobody needs to upgrade anything? That would be possible if we introduce a new file (e.g. INFO [^1]) for the things we currently stuff into META in spite of EUMM/MB never having cared about them. The data EUMM/MB do care about doesn’t really require Unicode, so if we only leave that data there, then historical versions of EUMM looking for META.json and parsing it using a broken JSON parser will work just fine, without the need to upgrade anything. So riba’s proposal has a benefit: it makes life better for users on old installs. Introducing a new file for install-time metadata (just because we once named another file META and would like to have that name continue to refer to all metadata about the distribution) would require everyone to upgrade their EUMM/MB to a version that supports this new file. This is much worse than making them upgrade their JSON parser. So might as well not do the separate files and just keep stuffing everything into META. That is, your line of thought here doesn’t seem to add up to any benefit for anyone compared to the current situation. It is true that using META for install-time data and then INFO (or some other name) for “general” metadata is annoying. But that’s the only way that it makes sense to separate the data into different files. [^1]: I don’t like `META.meta`. :-) Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
