Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Treewide metadata.xml

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 27 May 2005 12:38, Danny van Dyk wrote:
> Hi @ all,
>
> I'd like to have some feedback on an idea that stuck to my mind for
> some time already:
>
> Currently, we (should) have one metadata.xml file per package (8635 in
> the whole tree). This is quite handy if you want to look up information
> about a package you know by name.
>
> On the other hand, if you want to search for a package name via
> metadata, you have to traverse the whole tree. Quite unhandy if done
> w/o a cache and not yet implemented AFAIK.
>
> I would like to propose the following changes:
> Let's keep the metadata.xml in each package's directory in _CVS only_.
> Don't propagate them via rsync. Instead, use a script to compile all
> metadata.xml files into one central (XML) file. (This would probably
> need slight changes to the DTD). This file would then be placed into
> gentoo-portage/metadata/ and Portage,devs and users could easily parse
> it.
>
> TIA for any feedback on this!

Guys,

I've actually implemented a script that creates such a file (except for 
categories) and provided support in the dtd for it. I'd need to search 
where I have the script (it was fairly simple, but did a lot of parsing 
to ensure correctness). It was meant to kindoff be an alternative to 
packages.gentoo.org with all nice links to herds, maintainers etc. (Even 
reverse search). The biggest problem was that the stuff was kindof slow. 
Especially searching by xslt.

The script is kindoff slow because of all the correction stuff, but it is 
workable. You can find it (and the accompanying xslt script) in:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~pauldv/pkgList.tar.bz2

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net