[rb-general] lzip/plzip alternatives

[Daniel Shahaf]

Holger Levsen wrote on Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 11:14:21 +0000:
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 02:14:06AM +0000, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> > That notwithstanding, not all distros / packaging systems have the same
> > features.  (For example, FreeBSD doesn't have alternatives, and Debian
> > doesn't have USE flags.)  Therefore, the buildinfo format is going to
> > have to have per-distro or per-package-format extensions.  A Debian
> > extension can record alternatives, a FreeBSD extension can record the
> > contents of /etc/make.conf, and so forth.
> 
> I surely don't expect the .buildinfo files for various projects to record the
> same data, as different projects need different data.
> 
> And then I also don't expect these different .buildinfo files to use the
> same format, eg Debian uses rfc822 style, while I would find it entirely
> reasonably if a project which already does everything with yaml files 
> would also use yaml for their .buildinfo files.
> 
> In this sense, .buildinfo files are more of a concept to me (when see
> from a global perspective), where different projects will have different 
> implementations of that concept.
> 
> That said, it definitly makes sense to try to keep the number of
> implementations low and to make the implementation extensible (eg Debian
> and Ubuntu might use the same format but with different extensions…)

Agreed, but I think there's a further distinction to be made here: There
are two separate concerns: the serialization format and the data model.
The cost of having multiple serialization formats is relatively low; the
cost of having multiple data models would be greater.

To put it another way: if someone is trying to reproduce an entire
installation, it'd be nice not to have to have separate pieces of code
for reproducing Python pip(1) packages and for reproducing Perl cpan(1)
packages... even if pip(1) and cpan(1) needed different extensions.

Cheers,

Daniel