XSA proposal

[Steven Champeon]

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> XSA is supposed to solve a very simple problem: I and lots and lots of
> other people maintain lists of software and we have a very difficult
> time keeping them up to date. New versions are released that make our
> descriptions obsolete, email addresses change, links die, product names
> change etc etc

Yes.

> If developers could maintain XSA documents that listed these things anyone
> who was interested could poll them for changes at intervals and discover
> these things automatically. Today most software list maintainers simply
> don't even try to keep their coverage up to date and instead rely on
> developers to do it for them. The developers usually have their products
> listed in too many places for this to be feasible, hence XSA.

Linux developers (especially those using RedHat Package Manager, which -
side note to Tim - is one of the finest pieces of software for configuration
management I've ever worked with) have something like this already, though
not markup-language-based, called the Linux Software Map. 

 http://www.linux.org/apps/lsm.html
 http://www.ExecPC.com/lsm/

Every piece of software produced for (or ported to) Linux is expected to
have a .lsm file included in its distribution. The format of the document
is simple, and described in this readme:

 ftp://ftp.execpc.com/pub/lsm/LSM.README

I think this would make an excellent foundation for an XML application.
It might be useful to look at this as well as the IAFA format also
described the the above readme.

S
(my opinions only, not those of the WSP :) Heh.

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