Re: packaging system

[Søren Hauberg]

John W. Eaton wrote:
[snip]
> Hmm.  It does to me.  If we implement dependencies in the package
> system, then there is nothing preventing you from installing a package
> that doesn't actually have any files of its own, but depends on
> several other packages.  If you'd like, you can call your
> dependency-only package a "toolbox".  I see no reason to complicate
> things by introducing the concept of a "toolbox" as something that is
> somehow different from a "package".  It seems to me that both are just
> collections of functions.
My main problem is that I want to avoid having to do too much 
book-keeping. If we want to implement the
        help("toolboxname")
functionality, we have a problem with the "empty package" with many 
dependencies. With out any special book-keeping the above help function 
wouldn't present any functions since the toolbox doesn't provide any 
functions.

Introducing a toolbox field in DESCRIPTION doesn't make sense to as the 
package would then need to know which packages depends  on it.

The way I see things there are two options
1) Don't do toolboxes at all.
2) Start doing book-keeping. That is, introduce a some sort of graph 
structure to keep track of dependencies.

Neither of these solutions appeal to me :-(

BTW, I'm having some problems with expressing myself since I'm a bit 
hung over from last night. So, if I'm not making any sense just tell me ...

/Søren

> jwe