9 Replies to “BLURB: Software repository metadata convention”

    • Thanks for the pointer!

      It seems DOAP is defined here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj3/

      I think it is very close to what I needed, with some minor exceptions.

      * XML is not a human writeable format
      * There appears to be no filename convention? I could have missed this

      One approach is to simply define another data encoding format of the underlying generic DOAP idea. So it would use the same headers and semantics, but the information would be encoded in email headers. There could be tool to convert back and forth. And one need to agree on a filename convention, which is easy.

      Hm.

      • The spec is at https://github.com/edumbill/doap/wiki (I included a link initially surrounded by angle brackets but it got eaten).

        Yes, XML is (IMO) unappealing as a writing language, although RDF can also be represented with Turtle (http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/) for example, but I’m not sure if that’s really an improvement over a simple rfc822-style format, there’s possibly other representations.

        When it comes to the filename convention, I think each project might have chosen something slightly similar, as in projectname.doap (but better check the links in the “Web sites using DOAP” on the spec site for some examples).

    • Good pointer. DEP12 is inspired by DOAP but a human friendly format. What’s missing is only the filename convention? I should take a deeper look there.

    • Yup — they could consume and generate those files. Thanks for the pointer, understanding what kind of data values people are interested in is important.

  1. Sounds like the LSM file. I think that was Linux software map and from metalab but I could be wrong.