MakeRecipe: small suggestion for a change (hopefully does not take much time)

[rubyFeedback]

Hey there GoboFolks,

I am trying to use a second computer with GoboLinux; a slightly older one but it is working
fine (and UEFI etc... does not annoy me on that computer; has a simpler harddisc so it
really gives me less problems. Strange how older hardware works better there ... but I
digress).

When trying to do MakeRecipe, I noticed one thing that could perhaps be improved.

If you give the URL, it seems as if MakeRecipe insists that there must be a local
tarball with the same ending. So for example, http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.72.0.tar.bz2
and MakeRecipe will look at a file called curl-7.72.0.tar.bz2.

Personally I have all these archives available locally anyway, but I am using the .tar.xz format.
Mostly because this is more efficient IMO in regards to file size.

MakeRecipe will show a failure message if it can not find a local file in the main archive
( /Data/ ... somewhere ... Archive ... I forgot the path as I write this on my main computer
right now sorry, but I think you know the path ... where all the Archives are assumed to
be, for MakeRecipe to work, and perhaps also Compile).

So rather than failing early, I propose that MakeRecipe would first also check whether
a file called curl-7.72.0.tar.xz exists, and perhaps also a file called curl-7.72.0.tar.gz.

If MakeRecipe only works with the specified tarball format, then I propose that IF such
a tarball is found (for example, .tar.xz), it be automatically repackaged into the target
format (such as .tar.bz2 in this case, or .tar.gz). That way the user can avoid one
manual step.

It is no big deal because I can do so manually (creating the .tar.bz2 archive for
example), or will script it anyway via ruby (which I will probably do :) ) - but I
thought it may be a good idea for people e. g. to encourage them to contribute
recipes, get involved and so on. I think that is important to climb up with involvement.

(And on another side note, perhaps there could be something like the old recipe
viewer; I know github somewhat works for that, but the old online viewer was
more elegant IMO. The old one was e. g. at http://recipes.gobolinux.org/r/ whereas
this is now a redirect to github, which I can understand, but github is not as convenient
as the old variant was, IMO. I understand this from a maintainability point of view
though. I guess the old script was a .php file? Would be cool if that could be
re-used.)

[mwh]

Could you clarify what you want here? It sounds like you want MakeRecipe to work without downloading the file from the URL if you have it in another format already, and you don't want to change the recipe to use the .xz URL either, but the one at the specified URL is the one that actually matters for the checksum. Is that what you mean, or something else?