At 18:26 Uhr -0400 28.05.2002, Kyle Moffett wrote:
>I have been extensively looking at the Fink coding and Perl 
>scripts/libraries, and I think I have an idea.  I believe that much 
>of the Fink code needs an overhaul.  The whole dependancy system is 
>starting to break down. (See recent threads involving 
>splitoff/shared libs problems)

Wow. That's a gross statement. Yes there are problems, but deducing 
from this that "the whole dependancy system is starting to break 
down" ? That's a rather bold statement, esp. since you give no fact 
at all - may well be you "extensively looked" at the code, but can 
you please give proper justifications for that assertion, based on 
the actual code base? I.e. I much prefer facts over claims.


>  Also, a proposed extension to the info file format, variants, 
>requires a much improved system to be in place.

Since my opinion on this is radically different to yours, I look 
forward to hear your reasons that back your statement. Again if 
possible please based on hard facts. Thanks.

For completeness: I think implementing this inside Fink is not that 
hard (except that we haven't even finished designing it so it's 
impossible to judge with any final certainty). The major problem I 
observe is dpkg, which will not know about "variants", so we have to 
map Fink package variants to dpkg package names in some fashion, and 
that leads to trouble, because Fink package names won't match dpkg 
package names anymore.

Maybe I miss something in the codebase that will pose a major hurdle 
to adding variants, and that would basically require a rewrite of 
Fink - since you apparently seem to think so, you certainly can 
explain these reasons to us, I at least am eager to learn about your 
findings.

Also note that while we discussed the idea of variants on this list 
in the past, the idea and design were never even close to a state in 
which they could have been implemented, IMHO.


>  The recent storable-pm/indexing inclusion into Fink has alleviated 
>this third problem, that of speed, but in the future it will be 
>desirable to further increase the speed of the parser.

Sure, speed is always good to have :-)

>  I would like to propose that the core of the fink parser be 
>rewritten to include all recently added features, and fix many of 
>the dependancy problems springing up from the shlibs project.

Err, which problem would that be? Did you file bug reports on them 
yet? I only know about the old "problem", namely that we never 
implemented (Build)Conflicts in Fink directly, but what errors are 
there "springing up from the shlibs project" ?
Again, please give me something concrete, I dunno really how to reply 
to you since everything is so extremely vague and without any facts 
to back it..


>  I am willing to work on this for a while.  It may not be an 
>immediate transition, but I would like to transition to a faster, 
>more bug free system.  I also think that it the parser is rewritten, 
>it should be redone in C, C++, or Objective-C, whatever this list 
>decides upon.

Anybody who wants to work on such a rewrite will have to discuss that.



Cheers,

Max
-- 
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Max Horn
Software Developer

email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
phone: (+49) 6151-494890

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