>>>>> On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 13:13:59 +0100, Graham Barr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On Wed, Jul 26, 2000 at 12:35:39PM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: >> While I'm thinking about it I thought I'd post the URL for the OSD spec. >> >> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD >> >> While reading it two things were in question; how will it fit into the >> CPAN > This is TBD. But what I could see is an OSD directory in which OSDs are > placed. On upload of a distribution it's OSD would be extracted and > placed into the OSD directory. > One thing that came up during the meeting was that there should be > one OSD per dist which covers all implementatons. I was skeptical > of this at the time, but now having thought a bit more I think it > would work. I'd really like to keep the way CPAN is working now, just start using well specified metadata for it. The OSD probably promises too much. In practice it (well, its cousin in law PPD) only has proofed working for one architecture -- or are there any other known places it ever was used? And probably PPD only works for that one architecture because we have CPAN. Seeing it from that perspective, the only merging needed would be an extraction into the modules/02packages.details.txt.gz file. For a first implementation this should be enough. XML databases seem to tend to become very large collections of data, like database dumps. We should not do too much preprocessing of them as any transformation can be regarded as redundant bloat. >> and how do we get people not only to use it but use it consistently. >> It's food for thought anyway. > Well the generation of it would be part of makemaker. The really important > stuff would be added done by makemaker. The author would then be able > to add other info (like description, webpage etc) that would be of > use to indexers. I'd think, that the safer approach would be to add keywords to makemaker as needed and let makemaker write the OSD. That would help to catch errors early. Hand-written XML seems risky to me. -- andreas
