[RFC] Packaging technology update

[Tommy Reynolds]

Uttered "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>, spake thus:

> It would be nice, though, to *not* have to enter all the extraneous
> name info in contexts where it won't be used.  For example, doc
> revisions only need the person's initials to generate a revision
> entry, where RPM revisions need the person's full name and email.
> (BTW, generating the full name from the firstname and surname
> doesn't work for some people, like me for instance.)

I know.  That's why I have all those names, name parts, initials,
combinations and permutations like "wholename" in there.  From that,
I generate the DocBook's <articleinfo> and <bookinfo> entries.

Think of the rpm-info file as sort of a database where we can
squirrel away (potentially) useful data and then produce wonderous
results without resorting to custom surgery.
 
> I do want to actually move the content out of attributes and into
> elements where it seems more in keeping with standard XML usage,
> but I'll update the XSLT as needed to do that.

Be very cautious here.  I used attributes because they can make
searching and selection easier.  There has long been a war between
the attribute folks and the sub-element folks, but then an emacs user
should be familiar with that sort of thing ;-)
 
> What do you think about simply making the various pieces of <author>
> optional so that they can be used as necessary?

If these items are optional, then we must know _now_ how we are going
to use this info _later_.  However, I *do* wish XML had some sort of
static structure declaration.

Until we get the building process up and working, we really have
nothing to streamline.  I'll listen to discussion like this later.

To me, the key point of this exercise has been that we can plop all
the packaging information into a single meta file and fairly easily
derive whatever we need from it; I hate changing the same info all
over creation.

Thanks for helping!

Cheers
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