[Rpm-metadata] xml - first try

seth vidal skvidal at phy.duke.edu
Mon Sep 1 04:04:41 UTC 2003


On Sun, 2003-08-31 at 23:13, Joe Shaw wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-08-31 at 22:55, seth vidal wrote:
> > First try at the xml format
> > 
> > Don't abuse me too much but tell me what it is missing and where I went
> > horribly wrong :)
> 
> A couple things
> 
> What is the purpose of the "rpm" tag?  Is it for rpm-specific data?  If
> so, then maybe the packager, vendor, buildhost, and header-ranges should
> go there, as I don't think dpkgs have those elements.  Maybe group too,
> since they're pretty different and arbitrary for the packaging systems.

I was putting that down there for the information on where to find the
actual rpm the metadata describes. maybe <location> would be a better
name.



> Also, for the <requires>, <provides>, etc. tags, I'd suggest using the
> same tag underneath, so we can use the same parser for processing all of
> those tags in the same way.  For Red Carpet, we do something like:
> 
> <provides>
>   <dep name="foo" epoch="1" version="1.0" release="1"/>
>   ...

how is that helpful? If you're parsing the data and it's in the same
format then all you do is pass it to the same subroutine for parsing -
what difference does the tag name make? I thought <dep> was kinda
confusing when I was reading through packageinfo.xml b/c it's not a dep
it's an entry of the parent type. if you want them to be all of the same
name then <resource> might be a better name or <entry> - but <dep> is
confusing considering what's being described.


> Also, how are we going to handle the encoding of things like the summary
> and description?

I was doing some reading and it seems like libxml2 handles the encoding
for string data internally. When you output it it is escaped or
converted as necessary. I'm sure DV can correct me on this though.

-sv





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