Re: For the Abolishment of "Ports"

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

"James A. Treacy" <treacy@debian.org> writes:

> Writing perl is not the problem. Ideally, all the 'ports' would
> be in sync so a single page could be used for every package.
> As it stands, there is too much version skew to allow this without
> making the pages overly large and complicated. Disagree?

I do.

> Dependencies,
> for example, change between versions more frequently than you'd imagine.
> It turns out that you can't depend on any of the information on
> the page not changing between version, except the package name
> (if that changes, it gets a new page). This makes it really hard
> to design a nice clean page.

Irrelevant.  There is only one source package in the archive by
definition.  We should exploit this.  The only possible missing
material (lagged port) would be the .deb file.  In this case, we have
two possible alternatives: tell the user that it's not yet available
on their platform, or else use a heuristic to find the newest version.

> There are 2 alternatives. One is to have separate pages for each
> port. This would use a lot of disk space and require significant
> bandwidth for the daily mirror updates.

Icky.

> The second is to use dynamically generated pages. The problem with
> dynamically generated pages is that many parts of the world do not
> have very good connections to www.debian.org (or master for that
> matter which is where the cgi scripts would likely be located).

Icky.

I think there's a third alternative:

Stick with static pages, but allow the user to select their platform
(either via a switch or a cookie, even).  For mature ports which were
released, 90% or better of the binary packages are up-to-date.  Source
packages are in sync by definition.

I don't see what the big problem is...

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>