Journal of a modern day knight

Currently autopackage uses a (modified) version of luau to download repository xml files, compare software entries, and download .packages to satisfy a requirement. All of these actions are for dependencies and not for applications. An oft requested feature is a way to search for an (unknown) application or update/upgrade an application.

The searching for a package was made slightly better by having the package database listing. It would be better if the support code could query the database and go forward to download the package directly. Still nicer would be for the support code to know when an update is available for an installed package and that would start the download process.

My movement to both of these features was the statistics reporting framework. An xml file could be generated such that a client could download the repository xml file, compare versions, and download the update. The same sort of idea could be done for the searching. The idea was the currentversion data in the rootname table would announce the version available for updates. The repository xml file url in the rootname table would give the details to satisfy the requirements for the update.

What I do not know is a] what to use from luau or b] just do the entire process without luau. In using luau, a user/developer could use a repository feed for any type of package (rpm/deb/autopackage). Once the feed is registered in luau, it would be listed and managed by the luau client. For autopackage use, there are many layers and almost all of them could use luau in some way. The other way would be to use xml/xslt to get the data in a format in which comparisons are handled until a .package file can be located and downloaded for processing.

Layers:
Discovery ( Search ): autopackage
Discovery ( Update ): autopackage
Update ( Compare ): autopackage or luau
Manage ( Repository): autopackage or luau

I do not think a searching/updating feature is going to be that complicated using the rootname table as the forwarding service mechanism. Just not sure how much we need to continue to use from the luau project going forward or how much we have to do from xml/xslt scratch.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.