accessing package info from koji

[seth vidal]

I've been working on a new version of createrepo that uses the yum
modules to read in the package metadata. It's not really changing
createrepo fundamentally it just simplifies the code and reduces a lot
of duplication b/t createrepo and yum. However, one of the things that
comes out of this is the ability to create 'fake' yum package objects
comprised of data sucked directly out of koji.

The idea is that instead of getting a list of pkgs, getting the metadata
from them, then putting that metadata into the repodata xml format you
could just connect to koji with a list of specific packages you wanted,
request where the packages exist on disk (or a url to retrieve them) and
all the package metadata directly. 

anyway -for simplicity purposes it would be most convenient to do this
by forming an xml-rpc connection to koji and asking it for all the
required metadata for any particular package.

Right now the simplest way would be to have the xml-rpc connecting
module create a yum packgeobject and just submit it to the existing
class.

So, what I'm wondering is:
1. is all of this info available from inside koji?
2. is it possible to connect to the xml-rpc interface anonymously?
3. will it actually be faster or at least better to do this at all?

-sv