[packman] packman future

[Ralf Corsepius]

Am Don, 2003-01-09 um 19.10 schrieb Waldemar Brodkorb:
> Hi,
> Ralf Corsepius wrote,
> 
> > Hmm, why not - but I doubt all information can be extracted from rpms
> > (eg. further packages at packman)?
> 
> We could use some special comments in the header of the spec-file,
> (SuSE itself use such mechanism) every maintainer make some more
> tags on every package:
> #Packman-Depends: xine-lib xine-ui 
> #Packman-Info-de: asfsaf
> #Packman-Info-en: adasf
This kind of meta-language in spec-files can work for linux vendors,
because they live a closed universe of rpms (all rpms are provided by
them). 

The packman situation is different: We have to consider vendors and
other parties to replace packages we provided at one point in time, i.e.
we don't live in such kind of closed universe, vendors live in.

Hypothetical example:

We provide a lyx-1.2.3 package for SuSE, which depends on libforms-1.0
packages also provided by us. 

* Now, supposed, some time in future, SuSE releases a libforms-1.0
package, but doesn't update their lyx.

I.e. at one point in time we'd have to have a "Packman-Depends:
libforms" in lyx's rpm-spec, at a later point in time, this would not
apply anymore. If this info is inside of the spec-file, so we'd have to
rebuild the package.

* Consider supporting several vendors, eg. providing lyx and libforms
for RH/SuSE and may-be other vendors. If all packman-meta-info had to be
contained inside of the rpm-specs, this would prevent us from writing
vendor-independent rpm-specs.


Another technical issue: Internationalized package descriptions. Two
problems with it: 

* There doesn't exist any standardized approach to deal with them in
rpm-specs (RH uses specspo (an external package-description database),
Conectiva uses i18n-ed rpm-tags; Don't know what SuSE does.)

* The package description as to be seen on packman's end-user web-form
doesn't necessarily have to match with a package's %description.


> The spec file is always the most important part of the
> RPM build, maintainers would edit this file always.
Another point: Though some of the info in such a "meta-file" would
overlap with the actual spec file or the info contained inside of an
rpm, this info would by far not be identical.

Actually it would only contain the infomation required to put it into
the appropriate place of on the server and to fill out the entries for
the database.

Furthermore, some of the info for the web-form and installing the
packages on the server can be extracted from rpm's directly 
(rpm -q --queryformat "%{ARCH}" <pkg>.rpm), but these
"Packman-meta-tags" can not be extracted from the rpm. I.e. this would
require to unpack the corresponding src.rpm and to parse the spec-file.
To cite Jeff Johnson: A true PITA, my friend ;-)

To summarize: IMO, trying to encode Packman meta-info into the spec-file
is too unflexible and probably will fail (may even be impossible) to
implement.

Anyway, let's stay realistic, I don't see this to happen any time soon,
unless somebody actually wants to invest time into this.

Ralf