Re: Proposal: incremental release process (the package pool)
On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Lalo Martins wrote:
> Yes, but pool can have multiple versions of a same package.
But how on earth is anyone supposed to know which version is the one they
want?
> Hmm. I actually meant to use apt's install-time dependency
> check. It's smart enought to know when something is
> "installable".
To apply that individually to each and every package [there are 4000 of
them!] is too slow. It would be better to solve the conflicts problem
which is at least a weeks work, maybe more.
> You mean, use something similar to inodes to know the real
> "identity" of a file? That would be great.
rsync uses inodes to map hardlinks, so yes.
> Yes, but this means we would require the apt people to fix their
> front-ends by the time of the change. I didn't want to add this
> extra requirement. If it's ready by then, so much better.
If you emit all available versions then APT select automatically the
highest, but internally all are available for any future use. It is not a
good idea to put selecting the highest of many in dpkg-scanpackages.
> > In 2 months? Not likely..
> Why not? An email responding bot (borrow from BTS), an
> archive-handling script (borrow from dinstall) and a
> dependency-checker (borrow from apt)? Looks like work for a
> week. 2 months give time enought for testing and debugging.
The depenency anaylsis and consideration code alone from APT is nearly
5kloc, code able to effectively replace dinstall (~1kloc of perl) using
this new scheme may weigh in at least 2kloc of C, and the new code
required to ensure consistency I would estimate at around another 3kloc.
Given that the long term average code generation of most people is about
100-200 lines/day that would take you about one month to write, and at
least 3 months to sufficiently test. That is assuming you fully understood
all of the subjects at hand and did not have to learn anything substantial
new.
Then you would have to tack on another month at least to convert and train
the FTP masters, and begin preparing to convert the archive.
Jason
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