Bart Smaalders wrote:
> Rather than making the facet change state as a side effect of
> package installation, I'd rather invert the problem and make
> package installation a side effect of changing facets (if needed).
>
> We also need a way of describing the available facets, and
> presenting them to the user in a way that makes sense.
So, for example, your suggestion would be to have two facets for printing:
facet.printing.cups
facet.printing.papi
which could be presented to the user in some useful way. Either or both
could be enabled (or neither), but the interface would be through the
facet, not through any packages. So you could turn on the cups facet,
which would install cups and all the faceted dependencies (or files) other
packages might have on cups-related components to enable cups-based
printing.
It would also handle Laca's intersections issue just fine.
Which sounds just fine, except that a) it's raising facets to a higher
level of interface than I anticipated (which is perhaps not an issue, but
just a surprise to me), and b) has the flaw that if you simply install
cups, it doesn't enable the facet (which is perhaps not a flaw).
In general, I would expect to operate primarily on packages; while some
facets (do I want locale XX, do I want man pages, etc) would be highly
visible, others (like the printing examples) would be enabled by package
installation. Perhaps that's an inconsistency people would find confusing,
or more confusing than fully making facets a first-class interface?
Other related thoughts:
- If a package gets to turn on a facet, then it gets to define the
canonical name for that facet, which means that other packages which
want to be faceted like that need to (or at least would be highly
encouraged to) coordinate. This means there'd be a single facet to
turn on cups printing, rather than whatever joe package developer
decided he wanted to call it. On the other hand, perhaps the
coordination involved would be too much.
- If we get to turn on most facets by installing packages, then we don't
have to come up with a sophisticated interface for facets right from
the start.
No strong opinions on either of those; just wanted to get them out there.
Danek
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