reply: [Rpm-maint] Assorted changes in my rpm branch

[James Olin Oden]

> Hi all:
>
> I've been playing with my own branch of hg.rpm.org for a little
> while now, just to poke around at the code base, etc.
>
> Anyways, if you feel like looking at it, you can
> hg clone http://dangerouslyinc.com/~bowes/hg.cgi
> or view it via the web interface.
>
> Some of the changes in my branch are, from oldest to newest:
> * Actually get the thing to compile on my FC6 machine.
> * Remove xmlspec
That seems reasonable, but what I would really like to see long term
is very straight forward API for driving a build that is not convolved
with an particular file format.  A spec file is not necessary to drive
a build; users that are designing build environments can easily come
up with their own format (maybe information about the package is in a
database and fed into the build api for instance), but cleanly
isolating what needs to be input into the build and  having a standard
format that uses this (i.e. spec files) is much more important to me
than multiple config formats to drive builds.

> * Remove lua support
This has already been covered, but needless to say its is very nice to
work within rpm, and certainly to not require any particular shell.

> * Remove third party libraries
> * Remove using neon
> * Remove all support for non-local rpms
One of the good design decisioins of the old rpm was the concepts
behind rpm io.   Honestly, if done right, it is the sort of thing I
would think could be used in multiple applications.  That said, I
perfectly cable of downloading files myself, and don't need rpm to do
it.  Still splitting off rpm i/o into its own library as its own
project might be a very good thing (I would not call it rpm i/o
anymore though).

Cheers...james