[Yum] The Future of urlgrabber

[Michael Stenner]

If you don't know what urlgrabber is, you can safely ignore this
message. 

As urlgrabber has grown and been used by more projects, it's getting
harder to

  a) support all the needed features (byte-ranges, etc)
  b) keep all the old features (python 1.5.2 - 2.2)
  c) maintain clean(ish) code

After talking with seth, I think I'm going to make my own life easier
by rewriting it with a slightly different internal design (which I'm
willing to discuss with interested parties) and abandoning support for
pre-2.2 python (this allows me to work solely through urllib2, which
is much much nicer than urllib).

I will continue to support the 0.x series of urlgrabber (the one that
will remain in the 1.x yum) for bugs, etc, but it will probably not
get new features.

The plan is that the new version will be very backward-compatible,
although not completely.  For the most part, if you have a system
where the new version CAN work (python 2.2+) then most-likely, it
simply WILL work.

Also, there was some discussion of how urlgrabber should be used by
other programs (yum, for example).  Should urlgrabber have its own
rpm (deb, whatever) and simply be called as a dependency?  Or should
it be slurped into a codebase occasionally.  The former requires much
more careful backward compatibility and therefore places much tighter
constraints on urlgrabber's evolution.  Because urlgrabber is still
young and changing fairly rapidly, I lean toward the latter.

OK, that's a summary of what's going on with urlgrabber.  None of this
is final, although I will probably treat it as such if there is no
discussion.  Feel free to discuss, request, etc.

					-Michael
-- 
  Michael Stenner                       Office Phone: 919-660-2513
  Duke University, Dept. of Physics       mstenner at phy.duke.edu
  Box 90305, Durham N.C. 27708-0305