Re: [Synaptic-devel] Will apt support createrepo/rpmmeta-data repositories

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 21:05 +0200, Richard Bos wrote:
> I think the question is actually in the subject line:
> - Will apt support createrepo/rpmmeta-data repositories?
> 
> I couldn't determine the answer from:
> http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/apt/news/1.html

Hi Richard!

I don't think anybody is actively working on adding the repomd support
to apt. Progeny folks started on it, ages ago, but there's been zero
progress on it since the initial "here's a base class to parse xml data
with expat" patch in their tree. I did some work on top of that a year
or so ago but got nowhere near working state. It's by no means
technically impossible (or even terribly hard, just quite a bit of work)
but seems to me that 
- Debian people aren't really interested in the format, they're happy
enought with what they have already (although there *were* Debian, or at
least Progeny folks discussing the new repomd data on the mailing list)
- Folks in the RPM camp have moved on to either yum or smart, of which
the later can support just about any packaging format you throw at it so
nobody is interested in wrestling with the problem within apt-rpm. :-/

         - Panu -