Re: Extended package information in PEAR REST interface

Hello Daniel, > > The PEAR installer uses, as most of you know, a REST interface to > > channel servers[1]. It consists of several XML files at defined > > locations. > > What I'm longing for is a way to discover information like the > > package home page URL, as well as the package's public code > > repository URL (as well as its code http interface URL). > > > > The question now is where to put that information. The DOAP > > project [3] already defines a schema to express such information, > > and we should re-use that. PEAR actually exports DOAP already, just > > add "/doap" to a package homepage[4]. > Not fussed about either approach or bandwidth implications. I'd > probably go for the incremental change (loosen xsd). I've thought about it some more and I'd prefer the doap.xml way. Reason is that this would make it easier for clients to load these data, given that one can use existing DOAP reading code, instead of having to write custom code that loads PEAR's info.xml files with scattered DOAP tags. In the end this means that a channel aggregator only has to fetch p/packages.xml and the doap.xml files for each package - nothing more. > Am more interested in the different servers out there. I mean, we can > send in a pull request to Pirium and fix it in pearweb easily enough; > but there's a few other implementations around the place - some > maintained, some not. When adding a new file, existing channel server software does not need to be upgraded to continue to work. Channel aggregators could gracefully degrade. -- Regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen Christian Weiske -=≡ Geeking around in the name of science since 1982 ≡=-

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