Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] IMPORTANT: The proposal for the metadata.xml file

[Terje Kvernes]

Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> writes:

  [ ... ]

> I prefer plaintext changelogs. Maybe we can have both and make
> repoman parse plaintext files during commits and portage convert
> back from xml on request.

  I'm not a big fan of XML myself, but I don't really see a problem
  with the _source_ of a changelog being kept in XML.  keep XML as a
  data format and produce human readable versions for us humans.

  what _does_ scare me though is the scope of the metadata file.
  "everything" is there.  I'd much rather see several smaller files
  used as sources for the same purpose.  people will screw up the
  metadata-file and some will probably find the editing of it tedious.

  in my experience the single most important thing to do to keep
  anything up-to-date is to make it easy for people to do just that.
  hand-editing a large file in XML format is not exactly easy.

  my immediate though would be something like making the changes
  text-based and kept as single files for each change.  then one would
  use a tool to create the XML file from those change-files, this XML
  file would then be a part of the metadata.

-- 
Terje

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