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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: RFC: Life beyond 2.0
From:       David Sweet <dsweet () Glue ! umd ! edu>
Date:       2000-08-28 13:56:58
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On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Graham TerMarsch wrote:

> 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

Well  (MS-like or not :)  it seems like a lightweight, easy-to-implement
solution to the problem and addresses the issues of (i) getting the word
out and (ii) making packaging/distribution efficient/sane.

Dave

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