[packagekit] [gentoo-dev] Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

[Marijn Schouten (hkBst)]

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Sebastian Pipping wrote:
> I start to understand the real benefits of moving a larger
> part of the maintenance down to the distro level as you proposed.
> 
> Okay, let's add support for CPEs at distro package level
> and sync up and down with the central packagemap database.
> Please contact me for collaboration on sync scripts
> and "modeling" of details.

Do we not already have enough information available to automatically determine
derived unique identifiers like CPE?

We have the package homepage and the package name (and the package category) and
the combination should be enough information to do direct comparisons to data
gathered from other repos (assuming they also contain such data).

For example you can determine automatically that gentoo:dev-scheme/gambit and
debian:gambc are the same package because although their names differ they have
the same homepage and share a category.

To create the database, every time you see a package you get its metadata from
its home repo. Use those values to compare to existing CPEs. If it is not yet in
the database create a new entry (CPE) for it with all the metadata like
homepage, categories, other-stuff-that-is-useful that is available. Every time
you get a match you may want to improve the metadata of the CPE with the
metadata of the newly added match. The very least you want to do is record the
addition of the new match. For example if you just automatically determined that
debian:gambc matches the CPE you already have for gentoo:dev-scheme/gambit then
you add "debian:gambc" to the list of matches.

This should get you 99,99% of all packages. You can arrange to be able to
provide hints to the system for cases where it isn't able to do the correct
derivation automatically. This can be done by adding this information to an
empty CPE-database. For example if the system wouldn't be able to match
gentoo:dev-scheme/gambit and debian:gambc, then you can create a CPE entry that
contains both in its matchlist. The first thing that your program should then do
to populate the database is automatically fill out the rest of that CPE by
querying the gentoo and debian repos.

Users will be able to use names from any repo that they please in interactions
with packagekit's package manager (wrapper). For example they could do:
packagekit install debian:gambc. This is a lot more intuitive than using CPEs
directly (I don't know if this is what is intended).

There does not seem to be a need to do any manual conversion, enlist help from a
lot of distro packagers or add CPE to our metadata.

Is this the way you are also intending this to work? If not, why?

Marijn

- --
If you cannot read my mind, then listen to what I say.

Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project, Gentoo ML
<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-{lisp,ml} on FreeNode
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