Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified DEPENDENCIES concept

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 09/07/2012 07:45 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Since DEPENDENCIES hasn't been written up in a Gentoo-friendly
> manner, and since the Exherbo documentation doesn't seem to suffice
> to explain the idea here, here's some more details on the
> DEPENDENCIES proposal.
>

It seems to me that the problem this solves is just one of ontology.
It's analogous to trying to stick files named "foo", "bar", "baz",
etc. into directories named "depend", "rdepend", "hdepend", and so on.

There are a few well-known ways to organize things in a hierarchy, and
which one is most efficient depends on the categories and objects that
you have. Given the way that most software is built (see:
COMMON_DEPEND), I think DEPENDENCIES would work better than what we're
doing now, but it also seems more complex.

I think that dependencies are ultimately not hierarchical, and this
can force duplication in DEPENDENCIES as well. Has anyone considered
tagging the package atoms with a list of dependency types? For example,

  * foo/bar: ( build run host )
  * baz/one: baz? ( build )
  * baz/two, baz/three: baz? ( build run )
  ...

This would eliminate duplication of the objects (package atoms) in
favor of duplication of the categories (dependency types). Since the
package atoms are what we really care about, I think the tradeoff is
beneficial. Maintainers get to express each dependency exactly once.