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On Friday 05 December 2003 10:58, George Shapovalov wrote: |
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> Sorry for the crosspost, but it looks like this topic is approximately |
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> equivalently active on either lis, and I did not find the "submission |
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> instructions" perhaps because its not yet time for design submits :).. |
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Some words about your page, |
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Prolog != AI |
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AI != undeterministic |
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actually most AI research is into the area of deterministic approaches. Most |
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undeterministic behaviour which is not in games (where you want |
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undeterministic behaviour) can be found into trying to trying to get a low |
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complexity for problems that have natural big complexity. In this way |
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undeterministic means that in some cases the tricks don't work and you get |
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the big complexity (hell even caching is undeterministic in the same way). |
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prolog is very good at graph traversal tasks (which is what AI in many cases |
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involves and why in AI prolog is used a lot) as the mode of operation is |
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basically a depth-first backtracking search algorithm (about 10 lines of |
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pseudocode). For that reason I think it is a good candidate for the new and |
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improved dependency algorithm. |
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While prolog is very good for such tasks I don't think it is suited to |
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implement the core of portage. This is not because I think prolog is a |
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problem, it is because I think that such languages are not suited for |
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procedural dispatch, divide, etc. tasks. That is something that C is good at. |
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However procedural languages are very bad at tree traversal, so I think that |
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prolog is also a good option. |
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Then about caching |
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While you have a point with your prediction on number of packages, most of |
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those packages involve leaf packages. That means that the number of |
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dependencies per leaf package will probably not increase. However the amount |
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of packages totally not regarded will grow. For this portage should do some |
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kind of on-demand loading of packages. I see no need whatsoever to have a |
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normal emerge task load in the whole tree and create a graph of that. |
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I would like portage to remain lean and mean. I do run gentoo on a 16MB 60mhz |
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pentium, and I like it. While the cache should also be a module that replaces |
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a direct-tree-read module (possibly wrapping it), I think that caching should |
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be possible on a configurable level. Not just dumbly load in all ebuilds. |
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Paul |
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|
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-- |
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Paul de Vrieze |
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Gentoo Developer |
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Mail: pauldv@g.o |
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Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net |
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