Alternative forms of metadata

[Jeff Johnson]

On Jul 26, 2008, at 5:21 AM, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> 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.
>

The yum:sqlite format is a sqlite database, which is hardly a
form of markup. The data in the sqlite db is equivalent to the
XML, and the yum XML is likely (imho) to continue to be generated
for some time.

What would likely be more useful than adding yum sqlite would
be to verify the signature on the repo xml, I'm not sure whether
smart does that yet.

(aside) What yum really needs to do is an incremental, rather than an  
entire,
distribution for repo markup.

I was told yesterday by someone at SuSE that the solv format is used
for internal cache, not for distribution. That may or not be true. It  
will
be very tricky to use the binary .solv format outside of a zypp context,
the format is very specific to zypp with its sat-solver so far. Its  
too early
to tell whether .solv is useful (or not).

But SuSE is doing an exceptional job of providing multiple sources
of repo metadata. Perhaps reading the metalinker data would be more
useful for smart than chasing .solv files.


>
> 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)
>

I would agree with "best".

73 de Jeff
> --anders
>