> On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, David Douthitt wrote:
> > I suggested (earlier) that we use a <pkg>.desc file with tags. It could
> > contain all SORTS of things, and becomes extensible in a scary sort of
> > way. All sorts of descriptions could be in there:
> >
> > * version
> > * full package name
> > * packager
> > * compiler
> > * date packaged
> > * home URL for package
> > * group ("Net/Diagnostics")
> > * copyright ("MIT/X" "BSD" "GPL" "Proprietary")
> > * OSI compatable copyright? (true/false...)
> > * one line description
> > * Minimalistic requires... (ie, error if these are missing, but don't
> > stop...)
> >
> > A program could then scan all these packages, find all of the *.desc
> > files, then parse the tags and output some nice HTML. This can get
> > wild...
> >
> > I'm excited by this possibility...
>
> I like this too. It would make LRP a more coherent system, even if just
> under LEAF. I remember the frustration in trying to get into LRP; pages
> were out of date, pages were not there, sites were not supported etc...
> LEAF seems to fix all of that.
>
> Dale.
>
We could develop a nice xml/xslt interface to it all that would be easy to
parse, sort and categorize. It makes a lot of sense, but would require
updating a lot of old packages to include the .desc file. It would be a lot
easier to find a package, in the wild, for a given problem, even if you
didn't know the name of the program. Like searching for an MTA and coming up
with ssmtp.
The question is, how would the package storage on the server work? What I
mean is, a lot of packages now, obviously, have the same name, even though
they have different versions and different options compiled in. I suppose we
could database them, assign each package a number, and then just parse the
.spec file to resolve the number to a name and description, etc.
The possibilities of this are truly exciting, and not too difficult to begin
developing for.
Andrew Hoying
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