Re: RFC interaction with external dependency solver: "APT" state

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com>]

2010/5/18 Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>:
> Uhm, I'm not sure I understand the use case, but beside that (or maybe
> _because_ of that, arguably) I fail to see why you can't have the same

No problem, i didn't understand me currently, too. ;)
Just to add a bit more confus… clarification - i will
follow up then i have a bit more time.

> with the proposed architecture. In fact, the "extra:" prefix can be used
> to attach any kind of arbitrary field to packages, including the IDs you
> mention.

Let me use the following example:

$ cat /var/apt/lists/Packages-1
Package: awesome
Version: 1
Depends: cool-stuff

$ cat /var/apt/lists/Packages-2
Package: awesome
Version: 1
Depends: cool-stuff (>> 2)

$ cat /var/lib/dpkg/status
Package: awesome
Version: 1
Depends: cool-stuff

This can be all the same version, but it didn't have to.
The one from Packages-2 seems to be different
(at least it has different dependencies) -
and the one in the status file could be a rebuilt without
a version number change for example.

Different package managers handle this different - APT
for example tries to identify this by computing a checksum
of some common data (install-size and dependencies).
Others might (want to) ignore that completely.
(as already discussed in the previous thread)

Communicating this to the converter seems at least for me
a bit complicated as the converter will not know what the
manager handles as the same and as a different version
(and vice versa?).

(Yes, i know that is a horrible corner case)


Best regards,

David Kalnischkies