Hello Ryan,
I have tested your deb2n3 script on several (approximately 10
randomly chosen) different package files from
http://packages.debian.org/
and I always get the "Missing control files" error message.
For example try this:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/editors/emacs21
(choose package file for i386)
I have updated my rpm2rdf converter. Now it extracts and renders
dependency information also and the resulting RDF/XML is better
structured. See:
http://www.inf.unideb.hu/~jeszy/rdfizers/rpm.rdf
If an ontology will be available and used some parts of the result
should be modeled better. (For example, currently the ChangeLog is
represented by a Seq of ChangeLogEntry elements.)
The use of RDF containers is not consistent also: while Files and
ChangeLogEntries are grouped together and wrapped in a container
each dependency is represented separately.
But the resulting RDF/XML contains almost all metadata that might
be interesting and useful.
It is also quite similar to the output of your deb2rdf converter.
Based on the outputs of out converters it is clear that there are
RPM package metadata elements and Debian package metadata elements
with the same meaning. If we would like to develop an universal
software package ontology a detailed investigation of the formats
are required. The next step should be to comparing the RPM and Debian
package formats.
RPM information can be found here:
http://www.rpm.org/
The following document describes the RPM package format:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en/
More precisely Chapter 24 contains the details of the RPM format:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en/ch-package-structure.html
Unfortunately, it is incomplete. I18N features of the format are not
discussed, it is not clear how it is used by package maintainers. The
most painful deficiency is that it does not discuss character encoding
issues. These problems may be discussed on the following mailing lists:
https://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-maint
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
Is there an official Debian package format specification?
In the next two weeks I will be busy because of my work but I will
try to write down a few thoughts on a possible RPM software package
ontology.
Best regards,
Peter
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