Re: "dselect" replacement team
On 14 Apr 1997, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> writes:
>
> Or if your target platform doesn't have a working C++ compiler, as the
> Alpha did not until just fairly recently.
But it does now, and that is really the point isn't it? How many platforms
do you know that don't have a working C++ compiler that support the
basic features right now?
C++'s basic things have been unchaged for what, 6-7 years now?
> At this point, I'm not overly impressed with the direction this team
> seems to be heading---it seems to be more oriented towards the ivory
> tower ideal of "We'll use all the best possible tools", instead of the
> more utilitarian "We'll use the minimum of tools to get our work
> done".
Yes, I think we have been taking that aproach too. I don't know if that's
a good idea or not, time will tell.
> Nor am I impressed with the apparent attitude towards the existing
> code---I've seen a couple of "big rewrite" projects go down the tubes
> because everyone wanted to start from scratch.
I don't think anyone has ever said we should rewrite everything now. If
you read some of the msgs between Tom and I without reading the whole
thread then you might get this feeling. But what we were talking about is
the possible future directions of the libdpkg, we don't want to make some
silly decision now and then 4 months later say, 'You know, I wish...'
So we were speculating what would happen if we did do a rewrite, what
should the code look like and what should it be doing. I think we have
nearly finalized that.
> You can put in some comments, but for this issue I fall in with Ian
> and Mark---if you can't figure it out without comments, you probably
> weren't meant to modify it. I say this as someone who religiously
> comments my own code, and has done bug fixes on dpkg---it should not
> be too easy. Period. Some high-level narrative guidance as to what's
> going on is fine, but if you're commenting at the statement level,
> you're handing loaded guns to children.
-sigh- I have explained what I ment by that statement once already, once
again - I have no problems reading Ian's code with or without comments. It
mearly would have been alot quicker if Ian had put comments in some key
places.
> Now, I do disagree with Ian about having dselect still call dpkg---I
> think that libdpkg should indeed comprise all of the back-end
> processing that dpkg does, and that dselect (or its replacement)
> should be using those routines directly.
You do realize that either requires a dpkg rewrite or make Deity use the
same interface as the existing dpkg (Which might not be able to handle
it), don't you?
Jason
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