A word on package management

[J French]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> J French (me at semitekie.com) said: 
>   
>> Package management could be greatly sped up if the header files were 
>> split into two separate files, one containing only the package's 
>> version, dependencies and conflicts and the other containing all of the 
>> information that people don't normally look at (license, author, 
>> changelog, etc)
>>     
>
> I suggest you look at the contents of the primary xml files in the
> repodata as opposed to other.xml and filelists.xml...
>
> Bill
>
>   
yeah exactly. How much of that information is really required to update 
a system? To give a small example (right off the top):
<package type="rpm">
<name>xmlsec1-openssl</name>
<arch>x86_64</arch>
<version epoch="0" ver="1.2.9" rel="8.1"/>
<checksum type="sha" 
pkgid="YES">1424111620a512224a3456b34cd910e8bbc16ccc</checksum>
<summary>OpenSSL crypto plugin for XML Security Library</summary>
−
<description>
OpenSSL plugin for XML Security Library provides OpenSSL based crypto 
services
for the xmlsec library
</description>
−
<packager>
Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
</packager>
<url>http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/</url>
<time file="1160095638" build="1152759006"/>
<size package="81421" installed="213672" archive="214124"/>
<location href="Fedora/RPMS/xmlsec1-openssl-1.2.9-8.1.x86_64.rpm"/>
−
<format>
<rpm:license>MIT</rpm:license>
<rpm:vendor>Red Hat, Inc.</rpm:vendor>
<rpm:group>Development/Libraries</rpm:group>
<rpm:buildhost>ls20-bc2-14.build.redhat.com</rpm:buildhost>
<rpm:sourcerpm>xmlsec1-1.2.9-8.1.src.rpm</rpm:sourcerpm>
<rpm:header-range start="440" end="5936"/>
−
<rpm:provides />
−
<rpm:requires />
</format>
</package>

Much of this information is useless to anyone but a developer for or 
against a given package - things like packager, build host, even the 
description. If a user wants to see these, they should get the info from 
the secondary file. While this may not seem like a lot, it would make a 
difference if the user happens to be installing a lot of packages. IMO 
it should be as efficient as possible.

Not sure why I said changelog, but you get the idea.