8 Nov
2009
8 Nov
'09
4:25 p.m.
On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 21:46 +0200, Nedko Arnaudov wrote:
This is where user comments come. Some distros can assign comments to
packages, I've seen this in Arch, when I tried it recently.
The point is that having this stuff scattered all over the place doesn't
really solve the problem. We need to establish a standard format for
this data, gather the data (in a distro-agnostic format (RDF)), write
the tools, and get it done. People can package the results and
integrate it with whatever other things as they please.
Integration with packaging systems might be nice (for people that use
those distros) but doesn't solve the problem. First thing's first and
all that.
-dr
David Robillard <dave(a)drobilla.net> writes:
Mosts hosts don't even have RDF metadata. DOAP is just one vocabulary,
I agree it should be shipped with hosts though, and all data should
probably be in the same document (doap stuff, supported extensions,
whatever else). This would be a good precedent to set.
New idea: it is tempting to define a very simple
turtle document format
for hosts to signify what they support, then this kind of compatibility
information could be automatically generated as well (and in a much more
useful form than a human could put together). The information is
already there for plugins. As far as I'm concerned the lack of
automatically generated documentation (and/or machine readable data in
general) is pretty much the sole reason for every single complaint
related to this whole thing. This way is also decentralized, but the
results for all "known" implementations could be hosted at lv2plug.in
(or anywhere else) for convenience.
I am surprised I didn't think of this before, but it seems to be a
pretty good idea. All that is needed as far as maintenance goes is for
hosts to supply a simple turtle document that says "I implement foo and
bar and baz extensions". The rest can be compiled into whatever fancy
human readable form you want, for every single plugin out there, by a
tool. If I provide a template, would anyone be willing to put together
these documents? I will gladly write the tool if the data is there, and
the problem will be solved, and a convention set that solves it in the
future with basically no effort involved.
I've been thinking about this for a while and IMHO, it is best to put it
in the DOAP. OTOH, when things change they do change. And what user
really cares is whether plugin and host are compatible in the versions
that are supplied by their distro.
This is another reason for automatically generating it. Considering all
the versions, and all the permutations of hosts/plugins, doing it as a
human maintained static set of documents isn't really feasible.
IMHO, the two basic questions that user will have
are:
1. Will the plugin X that I use a lot work on host Y that I want to try?
2. Will the host W that I use a lot work well with the plugin Z I've found?
3. How "well supported" is this extension, and should I use it in my new
plugin?
This question needs an overview. Even if plugin and host authors supply
this information, an overview is useful.