createrepo/rpm-metadata repository format creator ver 0.3.4

[seth vidal]

Hi Everyone,
   I'm pleased to announce a release of createrepo that will generate
the xml format for the rpm/package repository metadata. (Metadata is all
the information about a package that the various pkg management tools
(yum, up2date, apt, redcarpet) require to figure out which ones a system
needs to install.)

A number of folks have been discussing and kicking around this format
for a while and I've been slowly writing the code to generate it. After
a number of revisions I think this one is ready for general consumption:

http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/generate/createrepo-0.3.4.tar.gz
http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/generate/createrepo-0.3.4-1.src.rpm

It requires python 2.X, rpm-python and libxml2-python.

You run it like yum-arch:
   createrepo /dir/you/want/to/make/into/a/repo

This will create a dir named 'repodata' in that directory. This will
have 4 or 5 files in it, depending on the options you passed to it.
These files are:

primary.xml.gz - this holds the primary metadata for the packages
                 (names, summary, requires, provides, deps, etc)
filelists.xml.gz - this holds the complete list of files for each 
                   package.

other.xml.gz - this holds all the changelog data and other things that
               might come up later

repomd.xml - this file contains all the info pointing to these other 
             files (along with checksums and timestamps)

Benefits:
 - Much smaller than the .hdr files yum currently uses
 - consistent to parse in many different programming languages
 - extensible for new things that need to show up in there
 - will hopefully be supported by all of the pkg management programs 
   in or around fedora core
 - should allow for a whole new set of datamining opportunities such as:
    - rss feeds of most recent packages
    - fast searching routines for miscellaneous strings
    - indexing and comparison of repositories
    - whatever else someone can dream up.


In the next few weeks I'll be releasing a version of yum that works with
this format and I'd like to try to make this version ready to go for
Fedora Core 3. However, other applications need to be ported away from
yum's repository format and to this. Rhn-applet needs to be updated to
work with this metadata. I believe up2date is ready to work with it now.

I'm suggesting that this program makes it into fc3 and that rawhide
starts having this format built for it, as well so people can work on
porting applications to this format. 

-sv