Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified DEPENDENCIES concept

[Michał Górny]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:55:10 -0400
Michael Orlitzky <michael@××××××××.com> wrote:

> 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.

This is nowhere near friendly to a developer...

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny