Re: packaging system

[Bill Denney]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, David Bateman wrote:

> Do we need the complexity of a tree structure for dependency check. I 
> thought the interest of that was to reduce the amount of work required 
> in checking the dependencies. This makes sense in a linux distribution 
> with a large number of installed packages, but will octave really ever 
> have more than a 100 or so packages installed at any time. So the flat 
> structure might be easier to get running and maintained initially.

I'm wary of any statement that would limit the numbers of anything. 
Initially, I'd say that anything that can handle up to about 10k packages 
within 3-5 seconds would be OK, but I'd want to be certain that the system 
could handle lots of packages.

> In any case, its an internal implementation issue of how the full 
> dependency table is kept. If we run into performance problems, we can 
> always switch to a dependency tree in the future with no visible effect 
> on the user as long as the DESCRIPTION file format supports it..

As long as there's not a user visible (including package maintainers) 
change if it is necessary to change to a different dependency checking 
routine, I think it'd be fine to do it any way that works.  This seems 
like something that's been solved many times before, though.  Can we not 
just grab apt-get (or some other program) and use their dependency 
checking routines?

Bill

--
"I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance 
that one of them will make my day."
  -- Dr. Richard Ames, _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_