From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jan 11 11:01:38 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA12500 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 11:01:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from cheddar.netmonger.net (cheddar.netmonger.net [209.54.21.140]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA12490 for ; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 11:01:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from chris@cheddar.netmonger.net) Received: (from chris@localhost) by cheddar.netmonger.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA01158; Mon, 11 Jan 1999 14:01:02 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <19990111140102.A25698@netmonger.net> Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 14:01:02 -0500 From: Christopher Masto To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New Pkg System (Re: State of the union, 1999. ) References: <199901110416.UAA13553@rah.star-gate.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.91.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Dom Mitchell on Mon, Jan 11, 1999 at 07:49:35AM +0000 Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, Jan 11, 1999 at 07:49:35AM +0000, 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. Given that Unix is traditionally a > text-processing system, I personally think that this would be a step > forward. I'd love to have XML stuff in the base system that I can > use. easily. But, to bring that much code in *just* for the packages > mechanism is probably overkill. You'd need to start using it > elsewhere to really pay off. But XML is small. What's a "fair amount"? I would think the basics are covered by a (doesn't have to be validating) XML parser library that the package system can link with. I seem to have something like that on my system (required for GNOME): -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 72658 Jan 8 16:29 /usr/local/lib/libxml.a -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 73154 Jan 8 16:29 /usr/local/lib/libxml.so.0 I'm sure there are even smaller implementations available. -- Christopher Masto Director of Operations NetMonger Communications chris@netmonger.net info@netmonger.net http://www.netmonger.net "Good tools allow users to do stupid things." -- Clay Shirky To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message