Second "RFC" on pkg-data idea for ports

[Kirill Ponomarew]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 11:40:59PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> [this is BCC'ed to -hackers and -arch just so everyone has a
>       chance to see it, but I expect the bulk of the discussion
>       should take place on the freebsd-ports mailing list]
> 
> Back in January I send out a long-ish email asking for feedback
> on some ideas I had for the ports-collection.  I received a fair
> number of comments, and have finally re-organized my ideas into
> a few web pages.  Hopefully these will make more sense.
> 
> Initially I had written the ideas up as a bunch of Wiki pages,
> but the machine holding that Wiki died, taking with it all the
> pages I had written...  I have not proof-read the web pages,
> so there's probably some spelling mistakes and odd sentences
> on them.  Apologies for that, but I wanted to get *something*
> sent out this week. This project has been blocked due to a
> lack of time on my part, and I want to get it moving again...
> 
> The basic idea is to collapse many of the separate files for a
> port into a single pkg-data file.  The web pages explain why I
> think this might be worth doing.  Please check them out at:
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~gad/PkgData/
> 
> Some of the work for this has been done, mainly just to see how
> well it might work out.  The project is still probably more work
> than Darren and I can finish, so we might limit ourselves to a
> subset of the idea.  For instance, we might start out by just
> collapsing the distinfo, pkg-plist, and "files/patches-*" files
> into a pkg-data file, and leave the other files for some later
> project.
> 
> What I'd like is some idea of whether this project is worth
> pursuing.  If not, then Darren and I will concentrate on some
> other, less disruptive project.  If people like the general idea
> of this project, then we'll see how much of we can do.  If we
> have some of the details wrong, then let us know what we need
> to change or where we need to look for more information.  I know
> that I am not a full-fledged expert in every facet of the ports
> collection, and I am not looking to ram some ideas down everyone's
> throat.  I just think that some change like this one could be
> useful for the ports collection, and I'm trying to come up with
> something that everyone sees as useful.
> 
> If this project does not seem like it would be worth the effort,
> then that will be perfectly okay too.  Please let me know what you
> think.  Also, please read the web pages before responding.  It took
> me a fair amount of time to write the web pages that are there (as
> lame as they are...), and I'd rather not have to retype all of that
> into a long series of disjointed messages...

Seems interesting, but why do you want to convert
ports-collection to XML-like format ?  Do you have any
particular reasons for that ?

The idea of putting distinfo, pkg-plist, files/* in single file
is also not quite good, sounds a little messy IMHO, the
overview of information will be lost.

-Kirill
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