[RFC] gnuwin32/kde-windows package format

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 03.01.08 12:01:11, Ralf Habacker wrote:
> Saro Engels schrieb:
> >I.1. Packages should be normal compressed archives either in the zip format or as a bz2-compressed tar archive.

Note: I haven't yet read the proposal, that answer has to wait til
tonight when I'm not working, thus only a short answer to this:

> The recently used package format supports some meta informations located in the .ver files (see II.3) but unfortunally there are no dependencies as other package formats like deb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format) and rpm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager#Physical_package_format have. 

I suspect rpms do the same, but for deb-using distro's the user-level
tools use a repository-stored package list which also has the package
information. Its easily generated from the .debs twice a day. So you
don't really need to unpack the packages to know the deps, you just need
to have a package list downloadable from somewhere.

> I'm currently experimenting with a kind of package descriptor as separate file (see http://download.cegit.de/kde-windows/kde-3.95.1/single/kdebase-mingw.hint for an example), which can be used to setup a remote repository database (see http://download.cegit.de/kde-windows/kde-3.95.1/single/_config.txt for an example) like the cygwin installer does. 

Hmm, I don't quite see the benefit of having it as a separate file if
you build a remote repository package list anyway. I mean extracting a
specific file from a .tar.gz or something like that is really fast and
usually doesn't need to read the whole compressed file. So letting a
tool extract the information from the compressed file on the server to
update the remote repository package list seems to be ok. As I said
above this is done for .deb-Distro's more than once a day and Debian
currently has over 18000 packages and its not causing trouble for
them...

Andreas

-- 
You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with dirt
is concerned.