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<h4 class="subsection">37.4.1 The DESCRIPTION File</h4>

<p>The <samp>DESCRIPTION</samp> file contains various information about the
package, such as its name, author, and version.  This file has a very
simple format
</p>
<ul>
<li> Lines starting with &lsquo;<samp>#</samp>&rsquo; are comments.

</li><li> Lines starting with a blank character are continuations from the
previous line.

</li><li> Everything else is of the form <code>NameOfOption: ValueOfOption</code>.
</li></ul>

<p>The following is a simple example of a <samp>DESCRIPTION</samp> file
</p>
<div class="example">
<pre class="example">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+
</pre></div>

<p>The package manager currently recognizes the following keywords
</p>
<dl compact="compact">
<dt><code>Name</code></dt>
<dd><p>Name of the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Version</code></dt>
<dd><p>Version of the package.  A package version must be 3 numbers separated
by dots.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Date</code></dt>
<dd><p>Date of last update.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Author</code></dt>
<dd><p>Original author of the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Maintainer</code></dt>
<dd><p>Maintainer of the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Title</code></dt>
<dd><p>A one line description of the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Description</code></dt>
<dd><p>A one paragraph description of the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Categories</code></dt>
<dd><p>Optional keyword describing the package (if no <samp>INDEX</samp> file is
given this is mandatory).
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Problems</code></dt>
<dd><p>Optional list of known problems.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Url</code></dt>
<dd><p>Optional list of homepages related to the package.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>Depends</code></dt>
<dd><p>A list of other Octave packages that this package depends on.  This can
include dependencies on particular versions, with a format
</p>
<div class="example">
<pre class="example">Depends: package (&gt;= 1.0.0)
</pre></div>

<p>Possible operators are <code>&lt;</code>, <code>&lt;=</code>, <code>==</code>, <code>&gt;=</code> or
<code>&gt;</code>.  If the part of the dependency in <code>()</code> is missing, any
version of the package is acceptable.  Multiple dependencies can be
defined either as a comma separated list or on separate <code>Depends</code>
lines.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>License</code></dt>
<dd><p>An optional short description of the used license (e.g., GPL version 3
or newer).  This is optional since the file <samp>COPYING</samp> is mandatory.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>SystemRequirements</code></dt>
<dd><p>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
<code>Depends</code> keyword.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><code>BuildRequires</code></dt>
<dd><p>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 <code>Depends</code> keyword.  Note that in
general, packaging systems such as <code>rpm</code> or <code>deb</code> autoprobe the
install dependencies from the build dependencies, and therefore a
<code>BuildRequires</code> dependency usually removes the need for a
<code>SystemRequirements</code> dependency.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>

<p>The developer is free to add additional arguments to the
<samp>DESCRIPTION</samp> file for their own purposes.  One further detail to
aid the packager is that the <code>SystemRequirements</code> and
<code>BuildRequires</code> keywords can have a distribution dependent section,
and the automatic build process will use these.  An example of the
format of this is
</p>
<div class="example">
<pre class="example">BuildRequires: libtermcap-devel [Mandriva] libtermcap2-devel
</pre></div>

<p>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.
</p>
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