Mod Meta

[rubenwardy]

I suggest that a new file called mod.conf or meta.conf is added to the mod structure.
description.txt should be depreciated.

title = Amazing Mod
 ^ human readable title
name = amazing
 ^ correct folder name
author = rubenwardy
 ^ can contain many authors, comma separated.
 ^ first name is main author
description = Adds amazing things to Minetest such as
              a flying hover and jelly babies.
version = 3.1
 ^ human readable
release-count = 3
 ^ increments on each release, would be used to check for for newer versions in mod store

[kaeza]

Related: #1062.

[Wuzzy2]

Comments:

The “author” field is problematic, because some names are impossible to write into this. Any names containing a comma is not possible, also whitespace is not possible.
Also, I would not say that the first author in the author list should imply that it is the main author. In collaborative mods like community_mod the notion of a “main” author does not really make sense. So I would say the order of authors in the author list should really not imply anything.

I suggest that all fields containing a string should be written in quotation marks instead to unambigiously mark the beginning and end of a string. Also, the following characters have to be escaped:

• " as \"
• \ as \\
• newline as \n

The “author” field should be a comma-seperated list of such strings.
Multiple examples:

name = "My awesome mod"

version = "1.2.3"

release-count = 5

description = "This is a description of the mod. Cool, right?"

description = "This description has\na line break."

author = "Programmer 1", "Programmer 2", "wEiR,.D nAmE", "Ev3N We1rd0r n4m3!1!1  .-3"

author = "Programmer"

author = "Name with \\ escaped \"characters\""

→ The last one will be displayed as “Name with \ escaped "characters"”
→ release-count is not a string, only a number

[rubenwardy]

That is true about the authors. I was trying to make it resemble minetest.conf's format as much as possible.

My current favourite format for configurations is YAML, it's pretty awesome (IMO), so if we're to create a new parser, I'd like it to be like that.

authors:
- rubenwardy
- blah blah
- foo bar

Maybe there should be some separation between authors and contributors? It is just for human reading. The logic behind main author is there may not be enough space for all of them. Maybe something like "rubenwardy, Wuzzy, sapier (and 5 more)" where those names are the first three.

[paramat]

@rubenwardy i think we have this now?

[rubenwardy]

I don't think we do
mod.conf is only used for name =, and doesn't support/standardise other things.

[rubenwardy]

#3392 would mostly fix this
Apart from tags etc

[paramat]

Okay my mistake.

[0-afflatus]

I'd like to see mod.conf and game.conf support a wider range of settings.