Hah, yeah, strangely relevant. PkgEval runs nightly (around 1am US Eastern), but obviously with so many people using Julia there is a lot of room for chaos inbetween runs.
On Tuesday, July 22, 2014 7:58:46 AM UTC-4, Tomas Lycken wrote: > > Look what my RSS reader just picked up! =) > > http://iaindunning.com/2014/pkg-deps.html > > // T > > On Tuesday, July 22, 2014 12:37:59 PM UTC+2, Tomas Lycken wrote: >> >> I still think the best way to resolve things if you should encounter >> problems, is to notify the maintainers. Most people in this community >> respond surprisingly fast =) >> >> There is some automated testing going on already, mainly thanks to [Iain >> Dunning](https://github.com/IainNZ)'s amazing work with PackageEvaluator >> and related tools. For example, if you click "more options" on >> pkg.julialang.org and then "Show package ecosystem statistics for Julia >> nightly...", you'll see some great data showing the current (and past) >> state of the entire ecosystem. You'll notice a few dips in the green curve, >> when changes somewhere suddenly broke a lot of stuff everywhere - and >> you'll also see that most of it was resolved in a matter of a few days. >> This happened because semi-automated issues were filed by the system >> against the packages when they broke, and maintainers were quick to fix >> whatever they needed. >> >> In the case of your problems - someone tagging a version without >> specifying a correct dependency - that will also be picked up by PkgEval, >> and the maintainer will be notified. However, since PkgEval only runs every >> now and then, and since quite a lot of users today "live on the edge" (and >> actively report issues when they find them) it's not uncommon that problems >> like this are picked up by users before PkgEval notices them. It's very >> likely that, as the ecosystem matures and stabilizes, this problem won't be >> a problem anymore... >> >> // T >> >> On Tuesday, July 22, 2014 11:47:32 AM UTC+2, Andreas Lobinger wrote: >>> >>> Hello colleagues, >>> >>> On Monday, July 21, 2014 4:53:17 PM UTC+2, Tomas Lycken wrote: >>>> >>>> I think this problem must be resolved by better practices among package >>>> maintainers: in short, the goal must be that as long as you only use (the >>>> latest) tagged versions of any packages, everything should Just Work (TM). >>>> That means, in short, that if a package maintainer adds functionality that >>>> depends on some specific addition to a different package, it is up to that >>>> package maintainer to make sure *not* to tag a new version until the >>>> dependency package has tagged one, in which the new behavior is included, >>>> so the dependency can be correctly specified. >>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>> ... in an ideal world. All that we use around julia has a version number >>> less than 1.0 so hiccups are expected (at least by me). The question was >>> rather how i can help myself and if there is some undocumented work >>> assumption. If i ever publish a package i'll try hard to follow your advice. >>> >>> This interdependency things showed up also in the great julia-graphics >>> thread on julia-dev. Maybe some automatic testing could help? Maybe some >>> dependency graph could be extracted out of the METADATA? >>> >>> Wishing a happy day, >>> >>> >>
