Re: Installation

Tobias Ratschiller wrote: > > > The idea is to put an XML file in each package distribution with all the > > meta information. There is no DTD yet, so here's a format suggestion: > > Great, I had hoped you'd go the XML route. :) > > - Q: Does it make sense to have more than one version element? A package can > be either stable or dev. A package distribution has only one of stable or devel, but a package itself may have both. The question is really whether this "pkginfo.xml" file should contain information about the package, or about the distribution. I guess since it is part of a distribution, it should only contain information about the distribution, because anything else would quickly become outdated. So one version tag then, with the "type" attribute indicating the status of the package. > - Q: Do you require a specific license for packages? If not, it should be > added. > - Q: What about requirements? Imagine I'd like to write a package which > requires libxml. Now we're talking about dependencies and version numbering. We need dependencies, but we should be careful so we don't make a nasty web of them that PEAR users get stuck in. CPAN handles this now by offering to automatically install any required packages for you, but before it did that this was a royal pain. But PEAR authors should be encouraged to use other PEAR packages rather than doing their own, so we must deal with dependencies. Dependencies should first of all be between PEAR packages. Dependencies to other things like special PHP versions or compile-time options, or external programs, should IMHO be documented, but should not prevent you from installing a PEAR package. Maybe a warning or something. Dependencies require us to standardize version numbers so they can be compared unambigously. For version numbers, I think [version].[release] is nice and simple, it doesn't have to be harder than that. The "version" part would say what API version (of itself) the package offers, while the "release" number starts at "0" for the first release and is incremented for every successive one. Version 0 could be special in that the package's API is not yet final, and may change between releases. It could be a good idea to copy Linux's odd/even version numbering scheme as well. Then we can make alpha or beta releases still using only digits in the version number. > - New: homepage: CDATA Good idea. > What about the installation? php -q Makefile.php? :) The idea is to install one or more PHP scripts to do this when you do "make install" in php4. It requires that the CGI version of PHP is always built and installed. - Stig