Re: Proper metadata format

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 11:23 +0200, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett wrote:
> 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,
 If you want to start working on docs at createrepo.baseurl.org for the
metadata format just sign up for an account and I can give you write
access to the wiki.

We do need to get more things documented in a common location.

thanks,
-sv