REGISTER-PLIST(1)

💅 REGISTER-PLIST(1) — the manual page, but make it a group chat

okay so bestie, buckle up, because this is register-plist from the General Commands Manual and she is lowkey the bouncer at the club that is your package repo. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

register-plist — smart diff and registration of packing-lists 🎀

(yes, "smart". she's not just diffing, she's *judging. main character energy fr.)*

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

register-plist [-n] [-s snapdir] dir [pkgname ...]
register-plist -p dir
register-plist -t p1 p2

three whole modes, three whole vibes. iconique. 👑

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so register-plist is used to check that a packing-list for a given package name doesn't change. like, at all. she remembers. she always remembers. 💀

by default she gets invoked at the end of make package, and she compares a temporary package against ${PLIST_REPOSITORY} before moving it over to ${PACKAGE_REPOSITORY}/${MACHINE_ARCH}/all (peep PACKAGE_REPOSITORY and PLIST_REPOSITORY over in bsd.port.mk(5) if you wanna meet the parents). 📦

package names (that's package stem plus version) are what uniquely identify packages. so like, when anything in the package changes, the package name should change too — usually by bumping REVISION. no cap.

she checks for a lot of details, including the DESCR contents. so changes in MAINTAINER, hard and symlinks existence and values, comments, and other things, will trigger REVISION bumps. she's thorough, she's nosy, she's doing her job. 🙈

🫶 dependencies get special treatment 🫶

addition or deletion of dependencies should warrant a bump, but register-plist will also verify that dependencies go ‘forward’. namely, it's okay for a @wantlib to go from liba.so.2.0 to liba.so.3.0 but not the other way around. ⬆️ yes queen, only forwards, we do not go backwards in this house.

starting with OpenBSD 6.6, @version bumps allow system-wide change to affect plists without triggering an error. slay. 🌈

✨ the actual recording bit ✨

register-plist records a packing-list for each pkgname into the given directory dir. if no previous packing-list for the given pkgname exists, the packing-list is recorded. if a previous packing-list does exist, register-plist compares both packing-lists for discrepancies. whenever something significant changes, she displays a diff of the differences and exits with an error. 💅 dramatic? yes. correct? also yes.

🧚 what's allowed to wiggle and what isn't 🧚

some items in the packing-list may change without actual problems — for instance, dependencies are allowed to go forward. on the other hand, some items like the package DESCR can't change at all. 🚫

and since this is a generated file, porters often overlook that items such as the HOMEPAGE or the MAINTAINER's email address are embedded into that file, and thus that changing these requires a REVISION bump. like bestie, your email is in there. she saw it. 👀

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• -n — register-plist will do the exact same checks, but will not write any new packing-list. look, don't touch. 🫶
• -s snapdir — register-plist will write the packing-list into a separate snapdir directory if there have been no errors (snapshot directory, to record all packing-lists from the current snapshot). ✨
• -p dir — she can also be invoked with -p and a dir. this will read the packing-list from standard input and check that it would register correctly into dir, as used by target check-register in bsd.port.mk(5). 👑
• -t p1 p2 — she can also be invoked with -t and two packing-lists p1 p2 to directly compare those packing-lists. just the two of them, head to head. 🥊

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• bsd.port.mk(5) — go read it, she's the whole reason this works 💜

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okay that's the whole page!! and a lil' sign-off from the bottom of the page: this one's from Debian, dated October 6, 2023, and it's the REGISTER-PLIST(1) page from the General Commands Manual. mwah 💋 go bump your REVISION bestie 😭🎀