produce a machine-readable manifest

[axodotdev]

produce a machine-readable manifest

[Gankra]

cc @sarahghp

[sarahghp]

(Assigned myself so I can find it again as I go.)

[sarahghp]

complete manifest of package contents..?

@Gankra I'm not sure what this means. What are package contents in this case?

[sarahghp]

README text

We should definitely let people give us accompanying text. I think there's a decent argument that it should be different from the README so that installation text can be focused more than a README might. Would calling it INSTALLATION.md so that people can put it in the repo be good? I say: probably!

Interested in your thoughts on this, too, @ashleygwilliams.

[Gankra]

@sarahghp for "package contents" i was picturing a literal "here is the directory structure and every file in the zip" with additional annotations like "this is an executable, this is...".

[sarahghp]

@Gankra:

@sarahghp for "package contents" i was picturing a literal "here is the directory structure and every file in the zip" with additional annotations like "this is an executable, this is...".

And do you see that as being generated by us when we ingest? What would it be used for? (I am not against it; I just want to understand.)

[Gankra]

Sorry thought I replied to this. I would expect cargo-dist to produce it, but I don't really have a good usecase.

I can vaguely imagine it being useful as a sort of "users are going to be opinionated and want to tweak locations/names of things, but if we have a listing of where certain semantic files are located then downstream tools don't need to worry about that -- they can just check the manifest for where the license files are, where the release notes are, where the main executable is, etc.

[sarahghp]

Ah, cool! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for walking me though it.

[Gankra]

I'm going to call this minimally done, we can file followups for additional fields we want to include. Otherwise this bug will become an endless zombie. (in particular there's no author/repo or build info atm)