Re: [gentoo-dev] SAT-based dependency solver: request for test cases

[Roy Bamford]

On 2018.02.06 10:52, Michael Lienhardt wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> With the help of some friends and colleagues, I am working on an
> SAT-based dependency solver for portage.
> We need your help to test it and possibly improve in the long run the
> already great portage toolset.
>
> To help, you can send us the tar generated by this bash script:
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HyVar/gentoo_to_mspl/master/benchmarks/get_installation.sh
> This bash script extracts your world file, the USE flags and keywords
> configuration of your system and the list of installed packages you
> have (it should not take more than few seconds).
> With this, we will see if our solver is able to recreate your system
> and how much time it takes.
>
> You can send everything to my professional email: mlienhar@××××××××.it
>
>
> The goal of this alternative solver is to overcome some of the
> limitations of emerge.
> Thanks to some users of the forum and the gentoo-user mailing list, I
> already tested the solver on 8 systems, and the results for now are:
>   - emerge is not able to recreate any of these systems (i.e., 'cat
> world_of_test_configuration | xargs emerge -vp' on a gentoo osboxes VM
> does not succeed, even with the right /etc/portage/package.* files)
>   - our solver takes 2 minutes in average (with little variation), and
> gives either a yes answer (with what to install, which USE flags to
> set, which packages to keyword) or a no answer (with the set of
> conflicting constraints) for every systems
>   - we solved one bug in our solver (a behavior of emerge that seems
> documented only in the PMS document, not in devmanual nor in the wiki,
> and that is visible only in 15 packages), but at least one seems to
> still be around.
>
> I started discussing this on the gentoo-portage-dev and the
> gentoo-user mailing lists (sorry for the duplicates), and on the forum
> with three posts:
>   - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1074170.html about the
> documentation I collected to implement the solver
>   - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1074202.html about the
> solver and its motivations
>   - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1075286.html about the tests
> I'm doing
>
>
> About me:
> I'm a researcher in computer science, about formal methods,
> concurrency and software engineering.
> Friday, I will present my first paper on portage, showing that its
> packages and their dependencies constitute what is called a
> "Multi-Software Product Line" in software engineering. If you skip the
> algebraic definition, it should be readable ^^:
> http://www.di.unito.it/~mlienhar/vamos.pdf
> In 2013, I designed and contributed to the implementation of a
> dependency solver for dynamic cloud architecture (currently maintained
> by Jacopo Mauro https://bitbucket.org/jacopomauro/zephyrus2/src )
> I'm a gentoo user since 2007, and I'm very happy by this opportunity
> to contribute back :).
>
>
> Thank you!
> Michael Lienhardt
>
>
>

Michael,

Posting here to alert other potential helpers.
Your script uses

PACKAGE_KEYWORDS="/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords" 

but thats a recent name change.

PACKAGE_KEYWORDS="/etc/portage/package.keywords"

is the old name and my older systems still use that.
You probably need to harvest both and process both as portage does.

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
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