New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))

[Philippe Laquet]

Stanislav Sedov a écrit :
> On Fri, 11 May 2007 02:10:05 +0200
> Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> mentioned:
>
>   
>> - I think it's time to give up on using BDB+directory tree full of text
>> files for storing the installed packages database, and I propose all of
>> this be replaced by a single SQLite database. SQLite is public domain
>> (can be slurped into base system), embeddable, stores all data in a
>> single file, lightweight, fast, and can be used to do fancy things such
>> as reporting.
>>     
>
> What is the reason to use SQL-based database? You'll perform direct
> queries to database? The packaging system is for ordinal users, not sql
> geeks, so they should not have to use sql for managing packages. So a
> simple set of hashes will suffer or needs. I agree with Julian that we
> should have a backup of packaging database in plain text format, and
> utility to rebuild it. This way we can always restore the database if
> something goes wrong. Furhtermore, that should not make a great impact
> on performance, since we don't have to rebuild it every day.
>   
I agree with Stan ;)

"fast and improved" package utilities uses mainly some indexed berkeley 
DB combined with flat files, aren't they? I, and may be many other 
FreeBSD users use light systems for efficiency and eaiser management, if 
we use some database system it will require Disk Space, ressources for 
the DB to run, dependencies and so on... And we also may be exposed to a 
"that DB is better" war ;)

>   
>> - A quick test confirms that the current bsdtar will happily ignore any
>> extra data at the end of a tgz/tbz archive, so package metadata can be
>> embedded there, thus conserving existing infrastructure and being fast
>> to parse. I suggest encoding this metadata in a sane and easy to parse
>> XML structure.
>>
>> I cannot currently actively participate in implementing proposed things,
>> but I can give advice on sqlite, database and xml schemas if anyone
>> wants to...
>>
>>     
>
> Why use XML for that? It's hard to parse and hard to read format, and I
> personally see no benefits of using it. If you're suggesting XML a
> simple bracket-structure format (like bind's config) will fit our needs
> much better (easier to parse and read and same benefits as XML). Also
> we might consider YAML, thought I like this idea much fewer.
>   
XML could be an altertative to order packages, it can be parsed with 
some limited dependencies like PERL. The userland tools to manage 
packages could be based on that language? It is well known by many 
users, quite simple, required by many other packages so the whole system 
won't be much heavier. PERL XML Parser can't be a good choice?

* PERL-DB for managing packages databases
* PERL-XML for parsing categories, dependencies ...

PERL also give , in most cases, good performance issues.

This is solely ma humble opinion ;)

> --
> Stanislav Sedov
> ST4096-RIPE
>