On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 10:19:36AM +0200, Andreas J. Koenig wrote: > >>>>> On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 13:13:59 +0100, Graham Barr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > > On Wed, Jul 26, 2000 at 12:35:39PM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: > >> While I'm thinking about it I thought I'd post the URL for the OSD spec. > >> > >> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD > >> > >> While reading it two things were in question; how will it fit into the > >> CPAN > > > This is TBD. But what I could see is an OSD directory in which OSDs are > > placed. On upload of a distribution it's OSD would be extracted and > > placed into the OSD directory. > > > One thing that came up during the meeting was that there should be > > one OSD per dist which covers all implementatons. I was skeptical > > of this at the time, but now having thought a bit more I think it > > would work. > > I'd really like to keep the way CPAN is working now, just start using > well specified metadata for it. The OSD probably promises too much. In > practice it (well, its cousin in law PPD) only has proofed working for > one architecture -- or are there any other known places it ever was > used? OSD can contain all the meta data we need. Merging is not strictly needed, we can use OSD without it. But to a large extent it does make sense. This is because the only parts different between two OSDs for the same distribution are the IMPLEMENTATION parts which describe which platform a givein distribution is for. > And probably PPD only works for that one architecture because we have > CPAN. At the moment I see it as completly separate. The PPD files point to somewhere else where the binary dists exist. Using OSd can bring CPAN and PPD back together. > Seeing it from that perspective, the only merging needed would be an > extraction into the modules/02packages.details.txt.gz file. For a > first implementation this should be enough. I don't see the point in defining our own file format when there is an extensible one out there that can be used. The first place we need to get the meta data is into the distribution, which OSD can help with. Why then change the format to disribut it on CPAN, that surely does not make any sense. > XML databases seem to tend to become very large collections of data, > like database dumps. We should not do too much preprocessing of them > as any transformation can be regarded as redundant bloat. It is one file for each source distribution uploaded. That can hardly be called large. > > >> and how do we get people not only to use it but use it consistently. > >> It's food for thought anyway. > > > Well the generation of it would be part of makemaker. The really important > > stuff would be added done by makemaker. The author would then be able > > to add other info (like description, webpage etc) that would be of > > use to indexers. > > I'd think, that the safer approach would be to add keywords to > makemaker as needed and let makemaker write the OSD. That would help > to catch errors early. Hand-written XML seems risky to me. I think a template appraoch is more extensible. MakeMaker cannot know about everything that goes into the OSD file. OSD defines a way for people to add thier own tags. This would not be very easy from MakeMaker. IMO the user should have a template OSD which they fillout and then MakeMake reads this, adds whats needed and then writes a new OSD which the information it does know (version etc.) which is inluded in the distribution. Graham.
