[Rpm-metadata] xml update

[Jeff Licquia]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 12:51, James Olin Oden wrote:
> On the same note was there any reason that tag atributes were choosen
> rather than children tags, as I would much prefer:
> 
> 	<entry>
> 		<name>rpm</name>
> 		<flags>GE</flags>
> 		<epoch>0</epoch>
> 		<ver>4.1.1</ver>
> 	</entry>
> 
> Was it in order to consume less disk space or their other disadvantages 
> to that approach (i.e. the one I am suggesting)?

I think I was the one to propose the current format for the <version>
tag.

One of the reasons is that "version" is really a unified thing.  Epoch,
version, and release all factor in as points of comparison for defining
whether something was newer or older than something else.  This is
reflected in Debian's encoding of all three attributes into one metadata
field.  So, unifying epoch, version, and release into a super-version
tag makes sense.

Another is that you've got two implementations of versioning: one to
declare the version of a package, and one for relationships.  Using the
same tag for both makes it easier to write generic version parser code
that can be used everywhere.  It's also more elegant, IMHO, to represent
the exact same data in exactly the same way everywhere.

Using name and flags as attributes of <entry> was someone else's
decision. Jeff J.'s proposal doesn't seem too bad, though I still like
the idea of reusing the <version> tag within the entry.