I think that's the least that needs to be done. As you say it is
easily fixable, and also until then it can be taken care of
server-side (where the question arises, what does the new repodata
format really buy us other than being xml? I was under the impression
that all depsolvers, rpm and deb and its cat were going to use it,
turns out it's yum and up2date only).
Do you think that's the way I wanted it? no.The point of the metadata
format was to remove the duplicate implementations of the same data. But
sometimes you end up that not everyone wants to do any work to implement
the functionality in their program. What more can be done to convince
them to do that?
So it's not a failing of the format, not as far as I've been told.
-sv