At Tue, 3 Apr 2007 13:04:36 -0700,
Sounds like your duplicating a lot of the functionality of jgoerzen's MissingH library. http://software.complete.org/missingh
yes. but better ;)
Not all of your functionality is subsumed, but he has a control-file parser and a version type too.
Yes and no. There are a few key differences, unless there is a newer version of his library that I do not know about. Our debian/control parser works with ByteStrings and Strings. When parsing an 18MB Packages file, there is a significant difference in speed/mem usage. The Strings version takes around 180MB of RAM and 30 secs. The ByteString takes around 20MB and less than one second. (hoo-ray for ByteString!) Also, I believe John's Debian version compare function just calls: dpkg --compare-versions and his DebVersion is defined as
newtype DebianVersion = DebVersion String
And the Ord instance uses unsafePerformIO to call 'dpkg --compare-versions'. So, his library has some portability and scalability issues. Also, our library has a beefier API. Anyway, the point of releasing our library (and making it BSD3) is to avoid any further duplication of effort :) j. ps. I hope this doesn't sound like I am ragging on John. He has some fine libraries, which we happily use. His Debian library was just not quite what we needed.