[hfdb] Re: Grand Unified Hardware Database

[Richard Stallman]

    1.  Someone has to type all that XML markup, and verify it, and make it
    consistent with the other XML.  

That would be a major issue if we had the amount of data that you were
envisioning.  I suppose Till could give practical advice about methods
for dealing with the issue.  With the amount of data that we are
talking about having in the early stages, it should not be an issue.

It might be easy to write something to read the XML files into an
RDBMS to check them.  If so, I'm not against it.  But if it would take
more than a day of work, I'm against doing it NOW.

    A vendor makes many devices, and a driver works in many OSes.  How will
    XML ensure that the vendor and the OS are referred to consistently?  More
    important, why should they?

I don't follow--why should what?  Anyway, there will be just a few
people entering data.  It won't be hard for them to ensure consistency.
This gets to be a problem when you have a lot of people, but the problem
you get in that case is even worse.

      In a relational model, the vendors are in one
    table and the OSes in another.  Each has an ID.  The Driver table need
    merely refer to the appropriate IDs to capture the referent completely and
    accurately.  

I think that the XML that Till uses does more or less the same thing.

    3.  Once we've got all those XML files in our CVS repository, how are we
    to discover how many of each device type we have?  Which devices by a
    given vendor are supported?  How many printers can be used with a given
    OS?  

This isn't really the problem.

    Even if I'm wrong, I'm right.  If the XML is any good, we can parse and
    load it into the RDBMS anyway.  

By all means, please do.  I am trying to simplify what we need to do
to get up and running.  I have no objection to reading the XML into
an RDBMS and doing useful things with it then.  I want to exclude that
from the problem we are tackling now.