Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 11:01:50PM -0500, Geoffrey Derber wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 13:21 -0800, David Braaten wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> First off, I agree on both.
> > I propose that:
> > 1) sorcery rebuild should do some reasonable
> > dependency sorting so that spells at the bottom of the
> > tree are built first.
> 
> Sorcery itself should be okay, we need to fully develope our depends.
> At the same time, I think some of the extremely low level stuff, all in
> basesystem there is supposed to be an non-explicit depends on
> basesystem.  I still think there should be ordering among the basesystem
> spells.
> 
> I know we are missing many depends than should be listed, but are not.
> I'm beginning to wish we had a way of testing fresh install
> dependencies.  For example, sorry to pick on evolution2 it might
> actually be good, fresh install, 'cast ximian-connector' see if all the
> necissary dependencies are found, I doubt it.  Or another example, fresh
> install, 'cast openoffice' see if that has all the necissary depencies,
> and compiles cleanly straight out.
> 

This is part of what prometheus was good at. Dufflebunk also wrote a
script to inspect libraries and derive the 'real' depends for a spell,
then compare it with sorcery's idea of the depends and report any
differences. I dont think anyone uses it, but even having a dozen people
use it and report their findings would greatly enhance the dependency
information. Its often the case that theres "just enough" dependency
information for things to work, but not much more.

-Andrew