Clayton Scott wrote:
> PPM uses files containing a modified form of the Open Software
> Distribution (OSD) specification for information about software
> packages. These description files, which are written in Extensible
> Markup Language (XML) code, are referred to as 'PPD' files.
> Information about OSD can be found at the W3C web site (at the
> time of this writing, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD.html). The
> modifications to OSD used by PPM are documented in PPM::ppd.
Read it about OSD. I think it's good to use it for representing the
dependencies. It coulde be used by the `par' utility to build the archive.
It should probably be included in the archive as well, for checking the
dependencies and platform stuff. The OSD stuff is very `push' technology
oriented, which would match our definition of `automatic', what has been
described here as `evil' and `insecure', but using the DTD could provide
interoperability with other tools that support OSD. It's also
Java/Microsoft-oriented, so I'll see what PPM::ppd says about it to make it
usable by Perl.
The problem I see with PPM is that, AFAIK, it handles only singular modules,
it can't directly handle bundles of modules and also scripts. As it should
be possible, it probably wouldn't be easy and neither standardized. (Please
correct me if I'm wrong here.)
In http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD.html#B they describe platform/cpu standard
names, and we'll definetly need those for checking target architecture. Can
we standardize upon those, or there's something missing? There's an issue
that I really don't know: in the same platform, different compilers generate
incompatible binaries? Because if this happens (and will still happen on
Perl 6) the platform identification should be os/cpu/compiler. Perhaps each
platform would have a list of `interchangeable' compilers, i.e. those that
produce compatible code and modules compiled with one can be used with a
Perl compiled with another.
BTW, I'm working on the PDD. Anyone has a suggestion on something to add?
Other important issue I don't know yet: Is there an Archive::Zip module for
Perl? How cross-platform is it? Can we bundle it with Perl (licensing
issues)? Is it stable? Will it give us the support we need (access to
individual files in the archive, and the ability to `fake' them as real
files through tied filehandles)?
- Branden
