[issue176] cd channel

[Christoph Thiel]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> >If you are interested in a list of problems that we experienced with 
> >rpm-md, we should probably take this discussion to the rpm-metadata 
> >mailinglist and try to agree on some fixes & extensions. (We at Novell 
> >have already added quite some extensions to rpm-md, which we use for 
> >our online update repositories. Unfortunately it's still lacking some 
> >decent documentation.)
> 
> I'm interested in problems, but I believe the politics of rpm-md have 
> doomed the format forevermore, better markup is needed instead. I've 
> currently implemented --yaml in rpm-4.4.7 which is already 60% of the 
> size of the equivalent (and rather terser than what is in rpm-md) dump 
> in --xml. Even the compressed yaml metadata if 10% smaller than the 
> equivalent xml.
> 
> But by all means, suggest your extensions on rpm-metadata. I love to see 
> vendor flame wars! ;-)

I'm not really keen on a vendor flame war -- but we should probably 
discuss rpm-md and it's challenges ;) [But not until we are done with SUSE 
Linux Enterprise {Server,Desktop} 10.]


> > >Hmmm, I can describe how the multi-cd swapping problem is solved in 
> > >anaconda if you wish.
> >
> >That would be interesting -- I don't know if there is any logic in 
> >smart to minimize the number of CD changes, and stuff like that.
> 
> For hysterical Conectiva related reasons smart overloads PreReq: 
> dependency flags with some CD switching semantics, I've forgot the 
> details.
> 
> Since PreReq: has (finally!) been ripped out of rpm, a better 
> implementation in smart will eventually be needed.
> 
> Otherwise smart has probably the best known (by me) solution for 
> multiple cd swapping.

Alright, so we will probably only need to fix the yast2 channel support to 
make use of smart's abilities then.


Regards
	Christoph