On 18-02-06 11:52:10, Michael Lienhardt wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> With the help of some friends and colleagues, I am working on an SAT-based 
> dependency solver for portage.
> We need your help to test it and possibly improve in the long run the already 
> great portage toolset.
> 
> To help, you can send us the tar generated by this bash script: 
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HyVar/gentoo_to_mspl/master/benchmarks/get_installation.sh
> This bash script extracts your world file, the USE flags and keywords 
> configuration of your system and the list of installed packages you have (it 
> should not take more than few seconds).
> With this, we will see if our solver is able to recreate your system and how 
> much time it takes.
> 
> You can send everything to my professional email: [email protected]
> 
> 
> The goal of this alternative solver is to overcome some of the limitations of 
> emerge.
> Thanks to some users of the forum and the gentoo-user mailing list, I already 
> tested the solver on 8 systems, and the results for now are:
>  - emerge is not able to recreate any of these systems (i.e., 'cat 
> world_of_test_configuration | xargs emerge -vp' on a gentoo osboxes VM does 
> not succeed, even with the right /etc/portage/package.* files)
>  - our solver takes 2 minutes in average (with little variation), and gives 
> either a yes answer (with what to install, which USE flags to set, which 
> packages to keyword) or a no answer (with the set of conflicting constraints) 
> for every systems
>  - we solved one bug in our solver (a behavior of emerge that seems 
> documented only in the PMS document, not in devmanual nor in the wiki, and 
> that is visible only in 15 packages), but at least one seems to still be 
> around.
> 
> I started discussing this on the gentoo-portage-dev and the gentoo-user 
> mailing lists (sorry for the duplicates), and on the forum with three posts:
>  - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1074170.html about the documentation 
> I collected to implement the solver
>  - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1074202.html about the solver and 
> its motivations
>  - https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1075286.html about the tests I'm 
> doing
> 
> 
> About me:
> I'm a researcher in computer science, about formal methods, concurrency and 
> software engineering.
> Friday, I will present my first paper on portage, showing that its packages 
> and their dependencies constitute what is called a "Multi-Software Product 
> Line" in software engineering. If you skip the algebraic definition, it 
> should be readable ^^: http://www.di.unito.it/~mlienhar/vamos.pdf
> In 2013, I designed and contributed to the implementation of a dependency 
> solver for dynamic cloud architecture (currently maintained by Jacopo Mauro 
> https://bitbucket.org/jacopomauro/zephyrus2/src )
> I'm a gentoo user since 2007, and I'm very happy by this opportunity to 
> contribute back :).
> 
> 

This sounds intresting, I wonder how it'd handle things like
sys-cluster/openstack-meta which can sometimes require masking a package
(gentoo stablizes a package ahead of what openstack has tested support
for).

-- 
Matthew Thode (prometheanfire)

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