[Rpm-metadata] two other areas needed

Joe Shaw joe at ximian.com
Thu Oct 9 16:01:05 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 01:04, seth vidal wrote:
> then maybe files like this:
> 
> 1. channels/repos/whatever available - timestamps/md5sums of the mdfiles
> 2. xml file of common data (nevral)and a tag telling what kind of file
> they are
> 3. xml file of their dep/provides/suggests/etc information
> 4. xml of complete file lists
> 5. xml 'misc' data (changelogs, 'other' data) :)

I'm not wild about having to download multiple files for each
channel/repo, but I can understand that people don't want to download a
bunch of data they don't need and that may just be the price of doing
business... :)

> Questions that come up - in this representation where do the pkg mgmt
> and vendors store their specific info? Where does rc store some
> licensing information (for an example)?

Probably doesn't matter... I would think in the common data file, but
we're going to have to do 2 passes (one for the common data, one for the
dep info) and maybe 3 if we want to do changelogs (which seems to be the
feature request du jour in RC), so either is fine.

The problem is that the stuff in the "misc" file is so subjective, and I
fear that most of us will end up downloading it anyway to get one bit of
useful info out of it.  It probably doesn't make sense to put our
license stuff in the misc file, if there's nothing else we would want
from it.  (Especially since it would probably be something like 20 bytes
per-package, with 15 or those being the markup)

> Would that be worth having an additional file? 
> 
> Am I maybe a little looney for suggesting this?

I like the extensibility of XML, so my feeling is that we don't lock
down the format.  If we do that, though, everyone's parsers will need to
handle tags and namespaces other than ones it's expecting, anyway. 
Those of us who set up repos will probably just have to do a "best
effort" when it comes to keeping file sizes reasonable.  For the name of
the license, we would probably put it in the basic metadata file,
because it's a minimal size increase for something that's a requirement
for us.  But if we wanted to have some large data (i don't know... a
per-package icon, for example) we might just want to do that in a
different file.

Joe




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