Lack of update information

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:45:12PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 17:43 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 06:28:43PM +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > > But what exactly would that solve? The ChangeLog file would be in the rpm 
> > > payload, so the contents are only accessible after the package has 
> > > already been installed.
> > 
> > Yum already pulls out lots of meta-info from the RPMs and stores it in
> > its own database, eg:
> > 
> > It can equally pull out the changelog file (or part of it) if required.
> > 
> > > The intended audience here seems to be "end 
> > > users", to whom the raw upstream SCM changelogs aren't often that useful. 
> > 
> > The stereotypical grandmum end user won't care about any of this
> > stuff.  Giving people detailed changelogs is useful if you're trying
> > to find out what *really* changed in the package.
> > 
> > Additionally the metadata is useful for other tools, eg. rpm2html
> > which generates sites like http://rpmfind.net/
> > 
> > To be honest I can't see a downside to adding extra metadata to RPMs,
> > except that someone has to write the code to do it.
> 
> And we potentially have to change the sqlite db format and the repodata
> formats to accommodate them.

The repodata is in XML where the X stands for eXtensible.  Extra
fields should be ignored if not used.

Typical SQL databases don't mind at all if you add extra columns to
tables.  Whether this is true of the on-disk binary(?) format used by
sqlite I have no idea, but if the sqlite format cannot handle such
changes, then it surely must be the wrong format for the task.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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