[Rpm-metadata] createrepo: initial comments and a UTF-8 patch

[Ville Skyttä]

I tried out createrepo yesterday somewhat, here's initial comments:

Issue 1:

It does not currently do a decent job in UTF-8'ifying content.  Not that
it would generate broken XML, but for example the UTF-8 "ä" in my
surname turns in to two "?"s, when it's already UTF-8 in a RPM header!

Patch attached.  This is a simplified version of what I use in fancix,
and the idea originates to decode() Skip Montanaro's query.py at
http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/python/query.py

The other gotcha in the patch is that when adding content to a libxml2
tree, one does not need to XML escape it.  AFAIK that happens
automatically correctly at serialization time.  XML escaping would be
only needed when printing stuff directly somewhere outside of the libxml
objects; that is not currently done so I nuked xmlCleanString()
altogether.  While at it, I added explicit encodings to serialize()
calls.

With this patch applied, the output is improved quite a bit here.  Add
new encodings to the list in utf8String() if you like.

Issue 2:

The name "author" attribute in <changelog> is not a very good choice
IMO.  RPM defines it as the "name" of the changelog entry.  It is very
common that for RPMs the author attribute will contain stuff like "John
Doe &lt;john at doe dot com&gt; - 2.6.8-0.1", ie. it's not only the
author -> suggesting changing "author" to "name" unless it causes too
much problems.

Issue 3:

  $ createrepo .
  [...]
  Saving Primary metadata
  Saving file lists metadata
  Saving other metadata
  $ echo foo > repodata/foo.txt
  $ createrepo .
  [...]
  Saving Primary metadata
  Saving file lists metadata
  Saving other metadata
  Could not remove old metadata dir: .olddata
  Error was [Errno 39] Directory not empty: '.olddata'
  $ createrepo .
  Old data directory exists, please remove: .olddata

Bug or feature?
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