On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 06:18:34PM -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, Donovan Baarda wrote: [...] > > This paritions the dependancies, making it all easier to manage, speeding > > the release cycle and potentialy allowing people to mix-n-match stable-core > > with unstable-gnome if they wish. > > So do you mean that these sub-distros don't have any dependencies on any > packages within the other sub-distros?
The normal approach to solving dependancy hell in large projects is to collect all the little components into larger sub-components in a way that minimizes the coupling between those sub-components. The top-level dependancies are then dealt with at the sub-component level. For example; debian-gnome 2.0 depends on debian-core >=3.0, <4.0. Provided the total "API" is backwards compatible for all minor versions of debian-core 3.x, debian-gnome 2.0 should work. Any change to debian-core that breaks debian-gnome 2.0 either must go into debian-core 4.x, or is a bug that needs fixing in debian-core 3.x. How you would use this approach and introduce it into Debian is not entirely clear. You could use something like a dummy sub-project package that requires, recommends, and suggests packages included in that sub-project as necissary. This dummy package could optionaly depend on appropriate versions of other sub-project's dummy packages. Packages could either depend directly on (optional) packages in other sub-projects, or on the other sub-project dummy package (which gaurentees the required packages of that sub-project). Alternatively, you could just continue on as is, doing nothing special beyond parititioning into sub-projects. This would mean packages in debian-gnome would depend directly on packages in debian-core. In this case I believe there would still be benefits, as developers of "frozen" debian-gnome could target "stable" debian-core and be comfortable in the knowlege things like libc would not change under them mid development cycle just before a release. Someone mentioned not liking the idea of having multiple apt-sources just to get a complete working system. There is no reason why there couldn't also be a single "Debian stable" apt-source that consisted of a single Packages file that included all the "stable" versions of all the sub-projects. Then people could put just "stable debian" in their apt-sources for a complete stable Debian, and then optionaly add "unstable debian-gnome" if they wanted. But ideas are cheap... implementing them is the real work. Feel free to forward this to debian-devel or debian-policy or wherever :-) -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ABO: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for more info, including pgp key ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]