The goal for this file format is to provide a standard for a file that can be downloaded and read by a program to install a given program from the distribution's repositories. These files could be linked to from a project's web page as the primary method for installing the program, or used on Launchpad to allow people to install the program that they're looking directly from the web page, among other things. This is the basic data that needs to be in the file.

<Package>
  <Name>package name</Name>
  <Version>package version (optional)</Version>
  <Distribution>
    <Name>distribution name</Name>
    <Version>distro version (optional)</Version>
    <Section>repository section (optional)</Section>
  </Distribution>
</Package>

In an ideal world, this data would be included within a Launchpad RDF file, so projects would be providing rich data about their project along with an easy way to install it all in one place. It's not really necessary though.

What I need is for people with more experience in dealing with XML formats to give some feedback and make sure I don't do anything ridiculously stupid. Once the format is fairly solid, I can hack together a commandline program that will parse the file and do the right thing with minimal effort. That would be fairly easy to adapt to work for another distribution, so I'd probably put out a version for Fedora as well to try to get some interest there. Please add any comments you have to this wiki page, preferably below this.

One potential "problem" that I see is that upstream packages are sometimes split into several packages in some distros (e.g. python in Ubuntu & Debian) and maybe vice versa. So there should be a way to specify more than 1 package to be installed. --JanClaeys