Alternative forms of metadata

[rehan khan]

I guess the question really is will the new metadata representations deprecate the original XML formats in the foreseeable future? If so what is the timeframe for this? I couldn't really find any information on this. Indeed, Distributions might find that Smart not using the more efficient methods of storing metadata are being 'abusive' to their servers (larger downloads etc).






From: Anders F Björklund
Sent: Sat 26/07/2008 10:30
To: smart
Subject: Alternative forms of metadata


Smart is currently using the XML version of Yum's RPM-metadata,
the primary/filelists/other (and group) files from createrepo:
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/

Other package managers have moved to more "efficient" forms of
representing these, and there has been some requests that Smart
should read the alternative forms instead of the regular XML:

yum sqlite: https://bugs.launchpad.net/smart/+bug/244889

zypp .solv: https://bugs.launchpad.net/smart/+bug/251020


This is easiest done by importing the parsing library, like
yum-metadata-parser or python-zypp, and calling upon either
yum or zypp to read the file rather than writing yet another.

But this would create a dependency of Smart on YUM / ZYpp, and
is probably best avoided. The current XML parser, however, only
requires the XML module (= ElementTree) maybe implicitly expat.


So I think it might be for the best to have Smart do only XML,
and close the above two with a "Won't Fix" (i.e. see yum/zypp)

--anders
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