From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jan 11 07:34:27 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA18957 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 07:34:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (fallout.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA18952 for ; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 07:34:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jfieber@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAA20860; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:31:52 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:31:52 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: Dom Mitchell cc: Amancio Hasty , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New Pkg System (Re: State of the union, 1999. ) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Dom Mitchell wrote: > Amancio Hasty writes: > > Has anyone thought of using XML , for instance, CDF - Channel Distribution > > Format, for describing packages? > > It sounds a lovely idea for describing the metadata of packages, > IMHO. Definitely prefererrable to the overloaded lines of text that > we have now. > > However, you would have to bring in a fair amount of XML related > software into the tree. XML parsers (unlike proper SGML parsers) can be extremely lightweight, particularly if only limited validation is needed. There are a couple good lightweight XML parsers available now. I have thought many times about moving port metadata into XML (COMMENT, PKG, PLIST, not to mention a variety of things currently in the Makefile.) but I have no time to experiment and I hadn't really thought about packages. -john To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message