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

[Philip Brown]

On 10/21/10, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

well, for OUR site, both are going to be there from now on, so its not
an either/or thing.

> Alternately, the tools could do:
>
> if gunzip is available and the .gz file is on the mirror, pull it.
> else grab the plain file

That is one approach. I'm not mandating behaviour of other peoples' tools.
However, I personally recommend against it.
Firstly, it's rude to go leaving a bunch of "ERROR: file not found"
log messages on someone else's server. Secondly, its kinda a pain to
mask the fails from [our] user.
(Because if it fails for OTHER reasons, you actually want to show the
errors to the user)

> 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.

This specific feature flag is not primarily for our site. This is
really for the more general case of
"pkg-get compatible sites"

At one time, I was planning to also enable "SITEFEATURES patches", to
allow for a patching scheme I was planning. Unfortunately, the amount
of research required to implement a patching structure, proved to be
too much to fit into my schedule. I only got partway into it.

But who knows.. perhaps other people can come up with other
interesting ideas for a SITEFEATURE also.