[Rpm-metadata] Dependency relations

[Joe Shaw]

On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 14:29 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > I've researched information about that in the archive, and found
> > out the exact moment in which the current scheme was suggested. It
> > was a message on 05-Dec-2003. The only answer recieved for the
> > propose was from Daniel Veillard, which suggested something close
> > to what I presented above. So, I'd like to know if there's still
> > time to adapt the current scheme for the presented syntax.
> 
> I'm open to the change provided there are no objections. I can modify
> all the code to make the change fairly trivially and since I don't think
> anyone is using this yet I don't think we'd break running code, yet.

If I remember correctly, it was so that we didn't have two different
tags for parsing versions (ie, one for the package itself and one for
the deps).  But since versions are basically opaque strings and don't
really need to be parsed as much as just put in some data structure, I
don't see any problem with this.

> > Another interesting point: since we're using a text file format,
> > is there any special reason for using "GE" and "LT" instead of
> > ">=" and "<"?
> 
> well, as it's xml you'd have to use the entity replacements for those
> which is less clear to most people.

Yeah, although I'd recommend "gt" and "gteq" for ">" and ">=" because
it's easier to distinguish than "gt" and "ge" for a casual read.

Joe