Re: Proper metadata format

Joshua Bahnsen wrote:
> All,
>
> I recently undertook the task of creating a perl script to perform a
> task similar to createrepo. My goal was to create something that could
> be used in Windows and did not require the rpm library. I found
> RPM::Header::PurePerl
> <http://search.cpan.org/%7Etlbdk/RPM-Header-PurePerl-1.0.2/lib/RPM/Header/PurePerl.pm>
> and for the most part it provided me with the proper information,
> however, I did need to extend it slightly. The output I created is
> based on the output of createrepo against a particular collection of rpms.
>
> My question is: Is there a proper standard for the metadata files? I
> have noticed the files distributed by RedHat do not necessarily match
> the files created by SuSE. I have also noticed that if I use
> createrepo against the RedHat Enterprise rpms, I am presented with
> files in a slightly different format. Basically what I am looking for
> is if there is a baseline of required items (for example, do all
> requires need an epoch?). I probably went about this backwards, but I
> want to make sure my resulting xml documents are legit. In my testing
> they work fine, I see the same results with the vendor provided files
> as I do with my own. I would appreciate any direction you can provide.
The standard is not very good documented. There are ongoing efforts on
leverage rpm-md more as a documented standard.

SUSE createrepo only adds a few things on the "core" metadata: enhances,
suggests, etc, dependencies.

All other extensions are done as non-core extensions, which are safe to
other tools that support rpmmd but don't know the extensions.

http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/Rpm_Metadata

I suggest you to look here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/Rpm_Metadata#How_to_extend_rpm-md_metadata_with_non_standard_data

I have been developing a tool meant to be run on top of createrepo's
output, which adds some of the extension data we use:
http://en.opensuse.org/Enhancerepo

For epoch for example, I assume the tag is required, but SUSE ignores
epochs for example when reading the data and feeding the solver.

Duncan