[csw-maintainers] upcoming extention to catalog format: SITEFEATURES

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Thu Oct 21 18:58:35 -0400 2010:

> Only planned imminently supported feature is going to be "gzipcatalog".
> This specifies, "This site provides the catalog in gzipped format".
> That is to say, you can expect to find "catalog.gz" alongside
> "catalog".

So the tools, at first use, download the plain catalog file and for
that run use it.  At the next run, it peeks inside the existing
catalog before fetching the new one?

Wouldn't it be nicer to just gzip the catalog as the default and
provide the uncompressed version for sites that haven't updated
pkgutil/pkg-get yet?  I haven't looked, but I'm guessing that sol9
just doesn't provide the default toolset to do this, making initial
bootstrap more strenuous...?

Alternately, the tools could do:

if gunzip is available and the .gz file is on the mirror, pull it.
else grab the plain file

I'm not seeing the benefit of putting a hint inside the catalog itself
as presumably mirrors aren't going to omit syncing the .gz file.

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302