(octave.info)The DESCRIPTION File

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37.4.1 The DESCRIPTION File
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The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file contains various information about the package,
such as its name, author, and version.  This file has a very simple
format

   • Lines starting with ‘#’ are comments.

   • Lines starting with a blank character are continuations from the
     previous line.

   • Everything else is of the form ‘NameOfOption: ValueOfOption’.

The following is a simple example of a ‘DESCRIPTION’ file

     Name: The name of my package
     Version: 1.0.0
     Date: 2007-18-04
     Author: The name (and possibly email) of the package author.
     Maintainer: The name (and possibly email) of the current
      package maintainer.
     Title: The title of the package
     Description: A short description of the package.  If this
      description gets too long for one line it can continue
      on the next by adding a space to the beginning of the
      following lines.
     License: GPLv3+

   The package manager currently recognizes the following keywords

‘Name’
     Name of the package.

‘Version’
     Version of the package.  A package version must be 3 numbers
     separated by dots.

‘Date’
     Date of last update.

‘Author’
     Original author of the package.

‘Maintainer’
     Maintainer of the package.

‘Title’
     A one line description of the package.

‘Description’
     A one paragraph description of the package.

‘Categories’
     Optional keyword describing the package (if no ‘INDEX’ file is
     given this is mandatory).

‘Problems’
     Optional list of known problems.

‘Url’
     Optional list of homepages related to the package.

‘Depends’
     A list of other Octave packages that this package depends on.  This
     can include dependencies on particular versions, with a format

          Depends: package (>= 1.0.0)

     Possible operators are ‘<’, ‘<=’, ‘==’, ‘>=’ or ‘>’.  If the part
     of the dependency in ‘()’ is missing, any version of the package is
     acceptable.  Multiple dependencies can be defined as a comma
     separated list.

‘License’
     An optional short description of the used license (e.g., GPL
     version 3 or newer).  This is optional since the file ‘COPYING’ is
     mandatory.

‘SystemRequirements’
     These are the external install dependencies of the package and are
     not checked by the package manager.  This is here as a hint to the
     distribution packager.  They follow the same conventions as the
     ‘Depends’ keyword.

‘BuildRequires’
     These are the external build dependencies of the package and are
     not checked by the package manager.  This is here as a hint to the
     distribution packager.  They follow the same conventions as the
     ‘Depends’ keyword.  Note that in general, packaging systems such as
     ‘rpm’ or ‘deb’ autoprobe the install dependencies from the build
     dependencies, and therefore a ‘BuildRequires’ dependency usually
     removes the need for a ‘SystemRequirements’ dependency.

The developer is free to add additional arguments to the ‘DESCRIPTION’
file for their own purposes.  One further detail to aid the packager is
that the ‘SystemRequirements’ and ‘BuildRequires’ keywords can have a
distribution dependent section, and the automatic build process will use
these.  An example of the format of this is

     BuildRequires: libtermcap-devel [Mandriva] libtermcap2-devel

where the first package name will be used as a default and if the RPMs
are built on a Mandriva distribution, then the second package name will
be used instead.