Re: Latest document..
On 4 Feb 1998 bruce@va.debian.org wrote:
> Ian Jackson commented to me the other day that he made a mistake in
> keeping "pending" selections and the actual package state in the same
> file. Today he would have put them in separate files, so that the actual
> package state would be modified only by dpkg (or some other back-end) and
> the changes you want made to the package state when dpkg runs would be in
> another, probably smaller, file.
Hm, deity will do this (xstatus). It makes sense, it is tricky to rewrite
the status file because you have to do ALOT of checking to be totaly and
utterly sure that no vital information is lost.. xstatus I can just dump
from memory ;>
> Can't you use "ls" to do an if-modified-since query for FTP? Never mind that
> the "ls" format used by FTP is unspecified, it is going to work 99% of the
> time, with the remaining 1% being DJB's silly FTP server which should not be
> used for a Debian archive. I don't see how it would be any more or less
> accurate than IMS via HTTP.
You can actually do MDTM on most ftp servers and get the time in a known,
parseable format. HTTP is just alot faster to IMS query. With http/1.1
servers there is no reason to use ftp, http is faster, easier to
get past firewalls and provides exactly the same functionality (including
resume).
> I don't think it makes much difference to your design, but we should not be
> 100% deb-centric. For RPMs and POSIX packages I am hoping we can translate
> headers to make them look like the .deb ones to Deity.
I have tried not to make it. I know I use 'deb' alot to describe things
but that is just to make it more readable to us debianites. Basically, if
you change the souce list to have a 'rpm' type then it can be extended
without incident to handle RPM's. For instance, the methods are totaly
independant of deb/rpm/whatever and are simply ways to get files from
various sources. Even the mirror list has the type specifier.
I'm not sure what direction we would go in for other package support, but
I have tried to make it so totaly different ways of doing things can be
specified. The 'deb' type encompasses the whole current archive layout and
package list format. It does not specify what the actual archive files
are, in theory, with some support from dpkg deity could handle rpm/posix
files without change.
With some more code it could handle RedHat's RPM archive (though I don't
see why) and if we ever change the ftp layout we can just make a new type
that represents that.
So hopefully it will scale nicely, but that is to be seen :|
Jason
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