New repository configuration ponderings

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 18:20 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 17:33 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > I've been thinking about improving the repository configuration and
> > related things for a while now. Just yesterday I realized we could
> > easily use the existing main configuration system for this, instead of
> > inventing yet-another-file-format and parser for it. 
> 
> Well, nice proposal, but ...
> 
> ... wouldn't an xml config file format be more suitable?

I *hate* XML configuration files from user POV. Also it'd be totally
different from anything else in apt configuration which is already messy
enough without yet another completely different format. 

Besides, the current configuration parser is already there and powerful
enough for what we need, I don't see any reason to write a new
configuration parser for this. In fact, I already have this halfway
working already :)

> In addition to that, ... I have a yum config parser (bison/flex based),
> semi-finished for quite a while ... 
> ... My once started, but never finished (secret) plan had been to write
> a yum->apt config converter or to add yum-config support to apt-rpm.
> However yum's config format even sucks more than apt's, so I never
> finished this add-hock implementation ...

The proposed format is quite close to yum's repository configuration
format on purpose, shouldn't be too hard to create a convertor for basic
cases at least.

	- Panu -