[gentoo-dev] Re: Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

[Steven J Long]

Richard Hughes wrote:

>  Sebastian Pipping wrote:
>> To do such mapping we need code (or a "service") that does the mapping
>> for us and base of collected data that the service can operate on.  Both
>> of these is project "PackageMap"
>
You might as well use Gentoo's version specification for your internal
format, as it's the most comprehensive. The most you need to add is
debian epochs.

> I'm also worried that a package manager has to read in and parse
> thousands of small files. Why did you decide to write each project as
> a single xml file?
>
<snip>
> I agree with the concept, but not the implementation. All you're
> trying to provide is a packagename <-> ID database. XML might be
> useful for storing the data, but not for querying.
>
XML was never meant for data-storage for such record-sets: it was designed
for data *interchange* between incompatible database engines, and as a
friendlier SGML for user-defined data (which some poor DBA/coder would
otherwise end up having to pull in from Excel, in most cases. The cleanup
in such cases can take days, depending on how long the executive in-question
has kept it as a pet-project;)

igli.
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