On Jul 13, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> On Jul 13, 2007, at 11:24 AM, Mark Hatle wrote:
>
>> My preference is external helpers.  I'm not sure if curl, wget,  
>> and/or
>> rsync is the right interface though.
>
> Another external helper vote tallied.

+1.

>> I'd like to see something that goes out and says "I need the  
>> following
>> information", and then the external interface can then use curl,  
>> wget,
>> rsync, neon, or something custom to do what it wants.  (The default
>> implemented should be http of course with whatever the standard
>> protocols decided are..)  but I'd like this modular.

+1.

> Better start thinking through how external helpers get executed.

I used yum (oh the horror) as part of a custom RPM deployment  
solution but needed it to talk thru a custom proxy. Due to licensing  
concerns, I ended up hacking urlgrabber to fork/exec an external  
process, passing it a URL as a single argument for each network grab.  
The external process returns whatever it gets back from the URL on  
stdout.

When the fork/exec for each network grab becomes the bottleneck in  
this solution, my plan is to just feed the external process URLs via  
a pipe.

So anyway, something similar using rpm would work out nicely.

j.