Documentation/4.8/Developers/Extensions/DescriptionFile

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Extension description file

An extension description file is a text file with s4ext extension allowing to specify metadata associated with an extension.

• A metadata is specified using a keyword followed by at least one spaces and the associated value.
• Multiline value are not supported.
• Empty line are ignored
• Line starting with a # will be considered as comment.

This file is generated by the build system in the extension build tree. It can also be generated by the ExtensionWizard using the extension metadata reported in the extension CMakeLists.txt.

Note that the Extension manager ignores many fields of the extension description file and instead uses information specified in CMakeLists.txt. Therefore, when making any changes to the extension description, it has to be done in the CMakeLists.txt file as well.

For the superbuild-based extensions, it is critical that the build_subdirectory is initialized to the inner build location in s4ext. The value of this variable in CMakeLists.txt is not used in all places by the dashboard scripts.

The following code block illustrates how comments, metadata and associated value can be specified:

# This is a comment
metadataname This is the value associated with 'metadataname'

# This is an other comment
anothermetadata This is the value associated with 'anothermetadata'

Supported metadata

Name	Description	Mandatory
scm	Source code management system: git or svn
scmurl	Read-only url used to checkout the extension source code
svnusername	Allow to specify username associated with svn checkout
svnpassword	Allow to specify password associated with svn checkout
scmrevision	Revision allowing to checkout the expected source code
depends	List of extensions required to build this extension. Specify "NA" if there are no dependency. Extension names should be separated by a single space. For example: extensionA extensionB
build_subdirectory	Name of the inner build directory in case of superbuild based extension. Default to .
homepage	Url of the web page describing the extension. See note [1] reported below.
contributors	Extension contributor specified as Firstname1 Lastname1 ([SubOrg1, ]Org1), Firstname2 Lastname2 ([SubOrg2, ]Org2)
category	Extension category
iconurl	Url to an icon (png, size 128x128 pixels). See note [1] reported below.
description	One line describing what is the purpose of the extension
screenshoturls	Space separated list of urls to images. See note [1] reported below.
enabled	1 or 0 - Specify if the extension should be enabled after its installation. Default is 1

[1] Parameter like &foo=bar are not supported. Use a url shortener.

Partially supported metadata

Name	Description
status	Give people an idea what to expect from this code