[Rpm-metadata] two other areas needed

[seth vidal]

Hi,
 I wanted to bring up a couple of things that may or not have been in
the archives. Originally we have discussed a way to represent the
metadata, the key information use for depsolving and for grabbing
package information. The goal was to see if we could come to some
consensus on a format to use so we don't end up having N repository
metadata data types. We all wanted something to be as small as possible
but carry a lot of data.

I think the idea we got fairly comfortable with was:

 handful of files idea - this is adrian's - the idea is to have 3 or 4
files which house all the data. The first file maybe lists the
channels/repositories and checksums on them - that way if that file has
changed you know if you need to get the others. The second is the file I
posted a little bit ago - the main package information file. The third
is a file containing the complete list of all the files for every
package. 

I'd like to recommend maybe including a fourth which might contain
'other, misc information - for example the complete changelogs or
somesuch things'. Matthias Saou recommended this b/c he would like an
easy way to do index generation of remote sites. He thinks the changelog
information is useful and would like for it to be indexed. I explained
that putting it in the main file would be wasteful of space and just
bloat things up too much, however, putting it in an additional file,
especially one that is not called on unless someone happens to want/need
the changelog data, might be entirely reasonable.

my general opinion is this last file could be entirely optional, so if
it is not present no one should be able to call foul, but it would be
nice to define the file format so it could be used in a consistent way,
if present.

How does that sound?

-sv