opam
opam copied to clipboard
Issues with and improvements to the format and content of coq-packages.json
I'm looking at the current version of the JSON format for the archive, and there are some elements that should be easy to improve to provide additional value for consumers of the API:
- include the contents of the
dev-repo
field in OPAM files to indicate the upstream repo (where more recent versions could possibly be obtained) - include both the
synopsis
and thedescription
field in OPAM files - currently onlydescription
is included - separate most recent version in
released
suite from most recent inextra-dev
, otherwise theextra-dev
version will always "win" - for example, do
"most_recent": {
"released": "8.11.0",
"extra-dev": "dev"
}
- the
coq-core-dev
repo/suite is not included, but many packages inextra-dev
depend on packages there - possibly, do some cleaning of descriptions and synopses, such as removing trailing white space and newlines
- package dependency information is not included at all - in particular, the Coq version requirements are crucial for automation
- build and install commands for packages could be included as well (useful as hints for automation)
We should also include the contents of the license
field in the JSON file. When SPDX identifiers are more widely adopted, this would allow producing easy statistics on popular licenses for Coq packages.