[Catalog-sig] Re: OSD (was: Too much good stuff)

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 02:26:47PM -0500, Mark W. Alexander wrote:
>I looked at that some time ago. Despite Microsoft's involvement, I
>have to say I think it's an outstanding idea to have the python
>catalogs be based on a w3c standard.

OSD is not a W3C standard; it's a W3C Note dated 1997, which means
it's purely informational and not any sort of standard.  Anyone can
write something up and submit it as a W3C Note.

I finally read the OSD spec yesterday, and wasn't very impressed.
Packages are nodes, connected by arcs representing the dependencies.
It's dressed up with lots of XML fanciness, but it doesn't provide
anything very sophisticated.  About the only other users of OSD seem
to be Marimba, and ActiveState's Perl Package Manager format.
Compatibility with the latter might be a good reason to use OSD.

--amk