On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 05:19:29PM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote: > Matt's e-mail and the referenced PDF document are intended to start off > those discussions. > > The PDF is the first time I've ever sat down and wrote, in one document, > what I've been thinking about for the last couple of years. While I > think it's pretty neat, I'm hoping others will be able to find holes or > problems with it -- or improvements they can make.
I will just publicy note some thoughts about a new dpkg that came up during discussions here on Debconf. Most of them probably only become relevant in the next phase of planning, when actually thinking about the implementation. But to have them recorded here can't actually hurt (even if some of them might be really obvious). * The new dpkg should be backwards-compatible with the current version in that it can read "old" debs and handle them correctly. I currently can see anything in the spec that would actually prevent us from implenting it. (This might actually handled by a completly different program that does the conversion but IMHO it should still be part of dpkg). * As I see it, the depency graph will get way more complex (mainly because of the feature depencies but also because of the multiarch support). Is there any danger that this will hurt us in term of dependency processing and conflict resolution? * Will it actually be feasible to have filters implemented in shell that will be called for every file to process? We probably need an API with these scripts so that actually need to be started only once (per package probably). Otherwise the fork rate will probably kill us, wont it? * An argument against something I have said myself: Tuning the diskspace usage of dpkg should become fairly easy with filters. E.g. we could have an alternative conffile implementation that doesn't save a copy of the file in the metadata if diskspace is more important to a system than ease of conffile change merging. Also things like deleting documentation and locale files will be trivially possible then. Gruesse, -- Frank Lichtenheld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www: http://www.djpig.de/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
