David Sweet wrote:
[.....snip.....]
> NOTES:  "somehwere on the net" could be any mirror of the KDE web site.  The
> program could choose the mirror based on locale information.  In that case
> the web site should contain a machine-parsable (XML would be great!)  page
> that tells the current version of each application, along with a separate
> page for each application containing other, current info.
> Or, CGI script that, given an app name, returns the current version, along
> with other info in an XML file.  Other info: app name (in case of change),
> HTML-formatted release notes, URLs to download from ( anything else? ).
> 
> I somewhat prefer the set of static pages b/c they could be easily mirrored
> by a crawling the main KDE site.

Sounds like you're thinking of something similar to the "Open Software
Description" that Microsoft uses (somewhere).  Its based around one or more
XML documents that contain all of the information regarding recent releases
(e.g. version, abstract, URLs to downloadable files, dependencies, etc). 
From having worked with it before its actually something that was fairly
well outlined and described; ActiveState uses something similar in their
Perl Package Manager (PPM).

If I could fire off on a tangent here for a moment......imagine that we've
got a single XML document that contains a listing of all of the "official"
packages and applications that we distribute.  This static document could
then be mirrored off onto all of the various mirror sites so that people
could access it from this new fandangled application that you'd described. 
The document itself then contains a series of URLs that the user could
attempt to download any updated versions from.  You've now got something
that's:

1.  Relatively easy to update when new packages are released; update the
XML document and let it get mirrored along with all of the other pages in
the KDE site.

2.  Not a big suck on server resources; we're not firing off CGI queries
all the time and connecting off to some database of applications that are
bogging down our already somewhat loaded machines.

Not to say that I'm a big fan of MS, but IMHO I think that the OSD idea was
something great that nobody ever took the time to implement.

-- 
Graham TerMarsch

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