On Monday 30 October 2006 14:31, sean finney wrote: > - anything remotely resembling a graph theory problem (pkg deps? bts?) I guess conflict resolution in the pkg deps graph, respecting /etc/apt/preferences *and* the user's wishes would be worth a try. aptitude's algorithm is good, but has one silly bug: when I want to install a certain (version of a certain) package foo and there are some kinds of conflict, aptitude often tells me that there are conflicts, and the typical proposed "solution" is not to install foo. (same for upgrade/uninstall/downgrade of foo) Also I would prefer the algorithm to try harder to satisfy dependencies by upgrading (or perhaps even downgrading) packages instead of by uninstalling them. Yes, I do mix oldstable/stable/testing/unstable + backports + volatile in a quite aggressive way, and because I usually know what I'm doing (and because the dependencies as such are really quite good), I rarely break my system. Nonetheless, installing app-from-sid-with-many-deps is much harder than it ought to be and means a 10-minute session in aptitude, mostly hitting +, b, h, enter and q in some random order. > - introducing new and non-trivial algorithms in bottlenecks anywhere > in the "project architecture" (vague, i know) Interested in sociology? How about statistics? cluster analysis of mailing list debates, identifying all the various groups of people in the project and how they shifted over time, use mailing list archives as input. That'd be fun to read, and would certainly spark at least 6 months worth of flamewars rehashing all the old flamewars that caused and killed those groups. Acutal benefit to the project: close to zero, I know. cheers & good luck -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/smtp
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