[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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