[csw-maintainers] Catalog generation date information in catalog/pkgutil?

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Wed Apr 13 12:06:46 -0400 2011:
>
>> That may as well just go with the output from "ls -l $CATALOG" rather
>> than having to actually parse the catalog  ?
>
> But you also need a way to compare the catalog you fetched with this
> value.


wget preserves the timestamp, though... ?

>  I think both things would be useful.  Embedded and externally
> available.

Quite possibly. but we still have the more important higher level
need, of informing the user somehow, "value X is the latest".

James writes:
>Which is tricky when the server fails give a date or the mirrors have
>the wrong time set or someone copies the file without the time stamp.

If someone has copied the file without the timestamp, they have done a
one-time copy, and are not using usual pkgutil/pkg-get update
channels. If so, seems like they dont care so much about "what is
latest"?

[note to pessimistic people: I'm not drawing out this discussion to be
difficult :-p I'm trying to flesh out and fully understand use cases.
It does not serve us well, if we implement a "solution" to something
that is non-applicable to start with. Contrariwise, a poorly
understood use case, may have a different problem, that we have not
yet seen, that still needs addressing]