Second "RFC" on pkg-data idea for ports

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:53 AM +0200 4/14/04, Martin wrote:
>Am Tue, den 13.04.2004 schrieb Garance A Drosihn um 23:40:
>
>  > If someone has a better format, and a format which will be
>  > as easy for a simple program to process, I will be willing
>  > to try that format instead.  I am not too hung up on this
>  > specific format.
>
>I would personally like it to use XML. I'm developing a small
>application which is a kind of GUI for ports (works like a
>browser). It is very difficult to parse the Makefiles to find
>out which version number and which dependencies it has. Some
>versions (like KDE3) are just variables and I don't have an
>idea how to fetch them yet.

If it is easy for you to execute commands, then something
like:

/bin/make -f /usr/ports/shells/bash2/Makefile -V PORTVERSION

might give you the result you want.  But I do not know if
that will work for all ports.

>With a structured language like XML, it would make the
>parsing process for such utils like mine easier.

Well, one of my goals for this project is to make it easier
for others to write programs which do their own processing
of the ports-files.  I am a little worried about how long
it would take us (Darren and I) to figure out the right XML
format, and how to process it, but maybe we really need to
do that.

Would it be useful-enough if the pd-handling program
could spit out a true XML-formatted document, once we knew
what that was?  I realize this is rather lame, but it would
allow us to keep this key program pretty small and simple.

>  > That is what I was thinking of when I picked this specific
>  > format.  With this strict, limited format, it should be easy
>  > to write a program that can do all the processing we want
>  > to do (at least for now).
>
>Before using XML, you should really ask people who have an
>idea about both, ports and XML.

Well, at the moment I am *not* using XML...  :-)

Right now I'm just looking for feedback.  Thank you for
providing some more ideas for Darren and I to think about.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu