What's been happening with Perl-RPM

Unfortunately, the short answer (at least with regards to the past 3-4 months)
is "not much".

Due to other demands on my time, I haven't been giving much attention to the
Perl-RPM bindings of late, with the exception of reviewing the changes that get
made by the maintainer of rpm itself. I hope to get some more work on this done
in the near future, though.

Right now, my plans for the near future are (in rough order of priority):

* Test and validate the current source base against perl 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 rpm's
  from redhat.com.

* Remove existing support for RPM 3.0.X packages. The rpm software is
  proceeding at a pace that makes it no longer reasonable to try and maintain
  compatibility with the 3.X line. Too many things have changed too thoroughly.
  To try a and maintain both lines only makes it that much harder to get
  *anything* done on the module at all.

* Design invocation-logic into the Makefile.PL so that it can discern between
  a build that is within the context of a larger build of the overall rpm
  system, versus a separate build that is on a different track (an update
  that cannot wait for the next rpm release, for example).

* Likewise, enable the testing system so that when the build is part of an
  overall rpm suite the local libraries are linked against at test-time.

* Attempt to lighten up the overhead in RPM::Database both in terms of memory
  usage and processing time, when iterating over a large number of headers.
  Part of the limitation here is how Perl handles hashes for operations such
  as "keys", in particular tied hashes. Perl wants to iterate once through to
  get the full list of keys (because it is a tied hash, the keys are not as
  readily-available as with ordinary hashes) before doing the actual iteration
  itself. Doing this may require some re-engineering of RPM::Header to make
  their initial creation faster and lighter.

None of this gets me any closer to being ready to handle package-level or
transaction-level operations (install, uninstall, verify, etc.), and there are
even more things under the hood than that (GPG signing, integrating a newer
logging model). But, one step at a time, as they say.

Randy
--
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Randy J. Ray     | Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them
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