[Rpm-metadata] updates

[Jeff Licquia]

seth vidal wrote:
> There has been an ongoing discussion on other lists and irc
> channels(mostly having to do with fedora, admittedly) on how to do
> repository mgmt so user's don't need to edit config files to add a
> repository, this is why I'm bringing this up here.

You might be interested in the work I did for aptconf, a configuration 
system for apt.  It's heavily Debian-specific, but the general idea 
could be adapted to RPM easily.

Basically, aptconf reads XML repository description files, and provides 
a UI for enabling and disabling repositories, adding manual 
repositories, etc.  It then writes a sources.list based on the user's 
choices.

Here's an example of the XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<repositories>
   <repository name="debian-stable" pkgformat="deb">
     <description lang="en">Debian 3.0 - main repository</description>
     <mirror location="at">http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian</mirror>
     <!-- full mirror list snipped -->
     <suite>stable</suite>
     <component free="yes" standalone="yes">main</component>
     <component free="yes">contrib</component>
     <component>non-free</component>
     <binary/>
     <source/>
   </repository>

   <repository name="debian-stable-security" pkgformat="deb">
     <description lang="en">Debian - security updates</description>
     <mirror location="us">http://security.debian.org/</mirror>
     <suite>stable/updates</suite>
     <component free="yes" standalone="yes">main</component>
     <component free="yes">contrib</component>
     <component>non-free</component>
     <binary/>
     <source/>
   </repository>
</repositories>

Obviously, this is too apt-specific for general use, but I hope it's 
helpful for thinking about this problem.  If we come up with something 
better, I would probably adapt aptconf to use the new system instead of 
the above.

You can find source for aptconf in Debian, or in Progeny's Subversion 
repository: svn://svn.progeny.com/apt/aptconf/trunk/