Re: Zero epoch vs no epoch (patch)

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Paul Nasrat wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-04-30 at 08:03 -0700, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>
>> BTW, I just realized the patch is against repodata DTD as epoch is listed
>> as a required attribute of version. It doesn't matter for apt whether it's
>> epoch="" or no epoch attr at all but of course we want to follow the DTD.
>> Just wondering should the DTD be changed not to require it, because it's
5~>> obviously *not* required by rpm nor deb so it doesn't make much sense 
to
>> require it here either.
>
> I think we need to replace the dtd with a schema, I don't think it's
> currently complete anyway.

Right.

Hmm, while we're at it, a couple of future wishes/ideas:

- For example the epoch-thingie (sigh) affects clients pretty 
dramatically, maybe there should be a global flag/attribute list of some 
kind that the clients can check whether they support the format / the 
format is usable with the client? Shouldn't of course be specific to the 
epoch issue (sigh), there could be similar issues in the future as well.

- Should there be some kind of creating client name + version (eg 
createrepo, 0.4.4) version information in the repodata? An example where 
this might be useful: I got bitten by some old version of createrepo 
having off-by-one error in metadata packages attribute - easy to work 
around by counting the elements instead of using the packages value but 
I'd rather not just quietly work around inconsistency in the data as such 
things *could* (at least in theory) be something more serious.

- Somewhat related to above - should the repodata generally versioned 
somehow? It's not inconcievable to me that there could be some 
incompatible change required at some point, would be nice to be able to 
check for such things instead of failing miserably :)

- Related to the above version thingy: if the groups-format is 
to be officially included in repodata, the format would have to be set in 
stone or at least versioned so a client can know whether it supports the 
version or not.

- Please lets formalize the groups format and stick to it :)

 	- Panu -