From: JamesBritt <james@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T06:11:32+09:00
Subject: Re: CPAN Style installer

> Well the main feature that uses the whole list is the --showall option. I
> could avoid pulling back the list, unless that option was used. I would
> love to have more details about the XML-RPC interface, is that available
> anywhere.?

If you download and extract the XML-RPC tar file, it creates a samples
directory, with (among other things) code for querying RAA.  You can ask for
stuff by category, name, a few other things.

You get back an array of hashes of arrays (or something like that).  I found it
less than intuitive, so I started on a class that wraps the results and creates
a set of flat RaaItem objects, with simple attributes (e.g. name, owner, ID,
download_url).

I then wrote some code that iterates over a set of such objects and produces
either RSS 0.9 or RDF/RSS 1.0.

Then I got busy with life stuff ...

XML-RPC has some other dependencies, though I don't *think* they require
compiling C code.  There's an XML parser needed in there someplace.

James