[Rpm-metadata] xml update

[Jeff Johnson]

Panu Matilainen wrote:

>On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 19:56, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
>Which reminds me.. the current xml suggestion doesn't have anything for
>per-repository/channel data. I suppose that's just "haven't had time
>yet" from Seths part but that deserves attention as well. Things like
>repository name, distro/version compatibility info... Apt's
>release-files have all sorts of information which needs to be mapped
>somewhere and this is imho a good chance to make the release* entries
>more understandable to non-debian folks :)
>  
>

The issue (imho) is one of precednce in a contains relation.

Assuming an XML syntax to represent the entities below, the interesting 
and important
question is
     Should repositories contain packages, or should packages have 
repository attributes?

There's a similar problem with another collection aggregate called 
"comps" that
is used meaningfully by all of anaconda, yum, and redhat-config-packages.

I can (and have ;-) argued for "packages having repository attributes" 
because
that is most useful for my rpm purposes, where a package is the clear 
and obvious
choice as the primary data object to be managed.

OTOH, there also very useful unifications with the alternative 
"repositories contain
packages" put forward, for comps, by skvidal.

There are certainly no interesting distinctions between the two 
approaches, each
achieves the goal of aggregation of packages into 
collections/repostories/comps/whatever.

However (imho) there may be useful performance gains in data retrieval by
preferring one or the other means to achieve aggregation.

Also, one of the original goals of rpm-metadata was a compact, easily 
downloaded,
encapsulation of metadata. Adding Yet More Stuff is somewhat at odds 
with that goal,
even if useful for folks who have to scratch their eyeballs maintaining 
XML ;-)

73 de Jeff