On Mon, 29 May 2000, Joey Hess wrote: > Vincent Renardias wrote: > > I find the current 'Packages' file format rather impractical and not > > complete compared to the index used on www.rpmfind.net for example. > > Hm. I don't. > > What are your specific concerns?
To have one real and exact indexing file instead of 3, one of them (Contents-$ARCH.gz) being continuously out of date. (Yes, it takes a hellish long time to compute from scrach, but no more than 5% of the informations it contains is changed daily and it's really easy to make an incremental update.) > The xml file you attached has lots of fields we don't put in Packages > files, because we don't need them. But if we do need them for some > reason, the current format is sufficiently flexable to have them added. Of course, I was giving this file as an example, since it indeed uses RPM specific fields (like Vendor, etc). But it seems like Wichert and Daniel Veillard (rpmfind author/maintainer) are working on a common format. > > If I develop a new XML based format and add it to dpkg-scanpackages, is > > there a chance to see is used? (concurently with the current format for > > example). > > Such an xml-based format would have, at a minimum, 2x the overhead for > tags than the current format has. Since these things get downloaded all > the time, that is a big issue, IMHO. To be honnest, the overhead is more like 2.5/3 times, however it mostly disappears when the file is compressed (since the same tags come over and over). > see shy jo, who thinks XML has its place, and this is probably not it. > See http://www.advogato.org/article/47.html My initial thought was not to make an XML index just because XML is trendy is summer, but to have an (=1) index file that can store more information than the current format does (file list for example). And XML seems a good candidate for encoding this data IMHO. What point makes you think it's not? (Did I overlook something?). Cordialement, -- "Si ca sent bon : mange-le, sinon pisse dessus..." [Proverbe chien]
