Jerry> On 19 Feb 2001 at 20:29:59 +0000, Jan Vroonhof Jerry> <jan.vroonhof(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: Jerry> Hmmmm.... you'd also lose the md5 checksum. On the other Jerry> hand, maybe there's a seed of a good idea in here Jerry> somewhere. The current package-index file contains Jerry> information with varying volatility. I'd group it Jerry> something like this: Jerry> Very stable (changes less often than, say, once a year on Jerry> average): standards-version, maintainer, distribution, Jerry> priority, category, dump, description, provides, type Jerry> Somewhat volatile (between the other two): requires Jerry> Highly volatile (changes with every package release): Jerry> version, author-version, date, build-date, filename, Jerry> md5sum, size Jerry> How about an approach like this? Jerry> - Maintain a package-info file that contains everything that is not Jerry> highly volatile in the current package-index file. On doing a Jerry> list&install, first check whether this file has changed, and download Jerry> a new copy if necessary. Another gripe about package-index is this: Newly built packages get added at the beginning of the package-index file. When the package-index is loaded, the last (later in the file) definition wins. This is broken as designed. Jerry> - Name the packages themselves like this: Jerry> name-version-authorversion-md5sum-pkg.tar.gz. (That will make for Jerry> very long filenames, but humans shouldn't be directly accessing these Jerry> files anyway.) Then use a parser like the one in my previous message Jerry> to pull out version, author-version, filename, md5sum, and size. Jerry> Putting date and build-date in there too is probably overkill, but Jerry> I'll let somebody else decide that. Jerry> What do you think? Jerry> -- Jerry> Jerry James -- Adrian Aichner mailto:adrian＠xemacs.org http://www.xemacs.org/