On 6/12/06, Alfred M. Szmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| With the increased flexibility in implementing filesystems as | per the requirements, we can implement the functionality | similar to apt-get, emerge or yum... (dependency tracking, | versions tracking...) in the filesystem itself.We can't. apt-get, emerge, and yum are interactive processes, a file-system requires a non-interactive processes since it doesn't have any communication with the terminal and keyboard. If something goes wrong, you want it to fail as cleanly as possible, the more `magic' you add, the worse things can fail. Yes we can. If package A says it depends on having B provided, anbd B is not provided, then treat A as not really installed, and display a notice about this in a suitable place. If packages C and D say they are exclusive, and both are "installed", and the user has not indicated a preference between them, then arbitrarily choose one of them, and display a notice about this in a suitable place telling the user to please choose. What you are thinking of is simply storing the current system dependency tree somewhere for the user (or program) to look at. apt-get, yum, etc do a bit more. For example, when you issue `apt-get install emacs', you will get a question if you wish to download emacs, including any dependencies, and then if you answer yes it will proceed to download all of these packages. It might also query the user about any helpful packages to install, and maybe report any errors while downloading. This is the kinda of functionality I was refering to. The functionality we want in stowfs is the functionality of dpkg (dpkg reports if any dependencies are not resolved to any program using it), not apt-get. It is true that this does do the whole job. It does the bottom half. We will want a program that the user can use to browse the available packages and select them. We want it to know, when the user asks to install package A, to ask the user "Do you want B as well?" With luck, we can use something like dselect which already does this job. Agreed, including a command line version of dselect (i.e. apt-get). Happy hacking.
Since apt has already been ported to use RPMs [http://apt-rpm.org/about.shtml], maybe we could port apt for this stowfs thing? Then we could run dselect on top of it. gnu/hurd - debian stowfs dpkg apt apt dselect dselect :) BTW - has anyone taken a serious look at using conary [http://wiki.conary.com/]? I installed Foresight [http://www.foresightlinux.com/] a couple of days ago and I /like/ the package-management (conary) end of things. conary takes care of everything. If we decided to use conary we wouldn't need to develop/use/fix stowfs (or decide on ANY packaging format), and we wouldn't need to port apt (or create something with similar functionality). Or perhaps we could modify conary so it uses stowfs instead of it's own databases... Unmodified conary would certainly be the 'simple' way (but we don't get to show off any wonderful translators :( ). -- Declan Naughton _______________________________________________ gnu-system-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-system-discuss
