On 6/8/07, Jeff Johnson <n3npq@mac.com> wrote:
> rpm and perl have a rather casual but important connection in rpm-perl
> over the years.
>
> At one point, Randy Ray's Perl-RPM was adop[ted and packaged with
> rpm-3.0.x.
> Then rpm-perl was dropped for various reasons.
>
> Chip Turner's Perl-RPM2 was re-added as rpm-perl in order to
> implement additional
> functionality. That is the current incarnation of rpm-perl bindings.
>
> The reason(s) for asking "Which perl bindings?" started here
>        https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-perl/2007-May/
> 000048.html
>
> I know that there are other perl bindings for RPM, and that Perl-
> RPM-1.51
> has recently been released.
>
> So I now ask here:
>     What should be done to best assist RPM <-> Perl binding
> development?
>
> I'm prepared for any answer, from "Nothing." all the way up to
> "Rewrite rpm in perl."
>

I personally think something that mimics the rpm api's is best, with a
bit of OO goop to simplify use of the data structures.  This was Chip
Turners approach with RPM2, basically you have:

   transactions
   db iterators
   headers

as objects.  It lacks today  problem sets and a few other things.

Unfortunately, I never have had the time to really go in and fill out
the binding to fully support the rpm api, but it has been imo very
very helpful in both our build system and in our upgrade scripts.  For
the most part also the api is almost a one on one mappy with librpm.

...james