Re: quasi-idea

Daniel Veillard <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.rpm.metadata
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sat, Aug 21, 2004 at 08:07:43PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> Hi all,
>  I was just reading over old mail and backlogs of irc among other things
> and I noticed something Jeff Johnson had mentioned a while back.
> 
> Specifically a comment about xml referrals. Is it possible to do a valid
> referral in an xml file, like you would with an ldap tree?

  If you explain the semantic you expect from "valid referral" I can probably
answer for the XML side.

> I'm asking b/c it would be an interesting experience to create a
> distribution 'tree' that was a set of metadata repositories tied
> together by a central metadata repo that used referrals to find other
> items.

  Sounds something based on Hyperlink references like for example based
on XInclude [1] might work. You can test with xmllint --xinclude ...

> It'd be interesting to see if people could assemble distributions from
> mutliple repositories.
> 
> Anyone think that might be an interesting area to look into?

  Seems to me doing the assembly at the XML level is not really the right
way. The fact that package foo comes from disto A while foo-extra1 comes
from distro B are of interest, for example if you need foo-devel you
really should look into A first. I really think aggregation should be done
hierachically and if you loose that at the metadata level, problems will
follow.

Daniel

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
[email protected]  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
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