[gentoo-soc] What's up in PEAR land?

[wiktor w brodlo]

Hello,
So far the progress has been quite smooth. Syncing from the main PEAR
repository/channel works, dare I say, perfectly, and from tests it
seems that alternative channels are synced to without problems, too.
Thanks to PEAR channels being based upon XML and its good
documentation, I've not encountered the problems tulcod (hi!) had with
parsing CRAN files.
Two things are left on my agenda for now, dependency support and installing.
Installing won't be too hard, the package.xml file is pretty simple.
The only problem here is that PEAR only provides with md5sums of each
separate file inside the package, but not of the whole package (at
least that's what it seems like). Also, I'm not sure if md5sums are
enough, since the packages seem to be validated with other hash
functions.
Dependency support is a fairly delicate matter. There exist two
versions of package.xml, the old 1.0 and the new 2.0. While the
differences between them are fairly small, the biggest issue is the
completely re-designed, incompatible dependency support in version
2.0. Since almost all PEAR packages today use version 2.0, and the
ones still on 1.0 seem to be mostly unmaintained packages and old
versions, I might just as well drop support for 1.0 altogether - this
will definitely simplify the code (and if nobody will ever use the 1.0
codepaths, then what's the point...). For now I will only support 2.0,
if there is substantial demand I will consider 1.0 in the future (if
time permits, then during GSOC, if not, then afterwards).
The developers of g-* (iElectric, tulcod and me) will be meeting on
IRC on Monday, 28 June to discuss progress and g-common. This is the
next step - now that we know our requirements, we can sit down to
g-common properly and come up with a good solution. Of course the g-*
tools/drivers won't be 100% ready by then, however, we'll know where
we're standing in terms of unification - and will be able to further
develop our drivers in a more co-ordinated way.
By the big meeting, I hope to have the installer and the dependencies ready.
Also, I'll try to get a git repo so that everyone can watch me coding.
I'm on IRC (wiktor_b #gentoo-soc) most of the time, however, I'll be
away from this Tuesday (the 22nd), and won't be online very often,
until the end of the month, I'll still be doing some coding all the
time though.
Happy coding/mentoring all!
~wiktor.