[Mageia-dev] Bug 2157 - Switch to "standard" rpm metadata for package repositories in Mageia 2

Marja van Waes marja11 at xs4all.nl
Fri Oct 28 07:42:00 CEST 2011


For whoever wants to discuss:

(In reply to comment #0)
 > Mageia 2 spec #034
 > also see https://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=iso2:technical_specification
 >
 > Mageia repositories currently have a media_info dir which contains a
 > line-oriented 'synthesis' file, plus some XML files with additional
 > information like package descriptions, and a hdlist which AFAIK is not
 > used by urpmi.
 >
 > Fedora and opensuse repositories do not use this format for metadata but
 > instead have a repodata dir containing a 'primary' and other XML files,
 > which are all listed in a 'rpomd.xml' file.
 >
 > The two schemes are similar which is not very surprising because the
 > requirements are the same. Most package managers with rpm support can use
 > the repomd style but urpmi can't. Only a few package managers support
 > synthesis style metadata. Switching to this 'standard' repository 
metadata
 > would give people more choice: use other package managers (e.g. yum 
or zypper)
 > in mageia and use urpmi on other distros. In the long term this 
should help
 > make urpmi easier to maintain: the "standard" metadata is a bit easier to
 > extend,
 > urpmi will be more a standard tool: behavior can easily be compared 
to other
 > package managers, test suites may be shared.
 >
 > Some not very useful index size numbers for mga cauldron x86_64 
core/release :
 > 1.7M    synthesis.hdlist.cz
 > 1M      info.xml.lzma
 > 5,6M    changelog.xml.lzma
 > 8,7M    files.xml.lzma
 >
 > 4,4M    primary.xml.gz
 > 3,4M    other.xml.gz
 > 11M     filelists.xml.gz (8,8M when compressed with xz)
 >
 > Goals:
 > - no negative impact for people who use the default package tools
 > - basic support for other package managers (yum, zypper, apt) in mageia 2
 >   (better support where packagekit uses the package manager the user has
 >   chosen is not part of this spec but could be a follow-up feature)
 >
 > the plan is:
 > - modify urpmi to only support repomd metadata
 > - add repomd metadata to the cauldron repository while keeping synthesis
 > - upload the new urpmi
 > - after either the mga2 or mga3 release:
 >   drop synthesis/hdlist metadata from cauldron
 >
 > so there will be 1 or 2 stable releases that carry both types of
 > repository metadata. The build infrastructure needs to support this of
 > course. This adds some complexity and uses extra space on the mirrors.
 >
 > Things that need to be changed:
 > - urpmi perl code
 > - maybe a fast xml reader in C, like yum has ?
 > - rpmdrake/installer ?
 > - build system
 >
 > Open questions:
 > - Is there anything I missed, unique urpmi features that will be 
broken by
 >   such a change, other expected problems?
 > - A volunteer is needed for writing the needed perl code for 
perl-URPM etc.,
 >   otherwise the change won't happen.

a comment here 
https://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?do=show&id=iso2%3Atechnical_specification :

sounds interesting but needs to have 2 kinds of metadata in parallel 
while it's not all integrated - discussions needed


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