Re: Debian development and release: always releasable (essay)
On 11/05/13 at 11:37 +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Quoting Paul Wise (2013-05-11 10:40:18)
> > Lucas created a script that displays a list of "important" packages, puppet
> > isn't on that either:
> >
> > http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/important_packages.cgi
>
> Not surprising as the algorithm (from what can be read in the comments)
> executes what we call build_closure algorithm in this paper [1]. During
> bootstrapping we execute the same algorithm with the only difference that we do
> not pull in source packages that only contribute arch:all packages (for obvious
> reasons).
>
> While we also recognized this selection of packages as important from a
> bootstrapping point of view (as it contains the largest strongly connected
> component in the dependency graph) it is not surprising that puppet is not in
> it. Instead, puppet is just a leaf package in the dependency graph.
>
> So while the set of source packages found by the build_closure algorithm should
> certainly be part of the "important" packages, this also shows an observation
> that we made during dependency graph analysis: The syntax of the dependency
> graph is not enough to make semantic conclusions of the contained packages.
>
> So instead, the important packages should be the union of:
>
> - the result of the build_closure algorithm
> - the transitive dependencies of all tasks and all blends
> - ???
The algorithm also includes "popular" (as in popularity-contest)
packages in the list, not just the ones required to bootstrap Debian.
But generally, I agree that the list of packages should probably be
extended using more criterias, such as inclusion in tasks/blends, or
importance for Debian infrastructure.
Lucas
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