Re: adding different compression types to createrepo

On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 13:43 -0400, Robert Xu wrote:
> We use createrepo, yes, but it's the users of our repos that are
> benefited the most.
> We have to tailor to their needs.

Sort of right. There are multiple goals to createrepo.

First - it was to be a tool to generate rpm-xml-metadata. Originally, it
was written as a reference implementation.

The format of the xml files is, ostensibly, the format. However, the
entire repodata structure, which is inclusive of compression formats,
have become a standard.

ie: xml files are gzip compressed, excluding repomd.xml which is not
compressed at all.

That means if we make it so that SOME repos are not compressed using the
same format we've broken the standard. 

That is, to me, a problem and not one to be undertaken lightly.


> Isn't that what a repomd.xml file is for?
> You can clearly see something is wrong if you download Fedora's apt
> package and try to use it.

But you can't clearly see that something is  wrong unless you are
willing to trust the filenames.


> It'd be nice to have repomd have "backwards compat" in the file.
> But then again, why would you use another distro's files?

There are lots of repos made which are for ALL distros - for example the
adobe-flash repos which are just 'yum repos' and are not distro
specific.


> Truthfully, I would rather xz the xml files than xz the sqlite files;
> The sqlite files would still end up bigger.

the sqlite is not really involved, at all, at this point. We can safely
ignore it.

-sv