[pacman-dev] pacman -S 'dependency>=2.0' (was: Status of _alpm_find_first_satisfier?)

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Nagy Gabor wrote:

...

I think that _alpm_find_first_satisfier implementation is a bit complicated... I would prefer just ~reimplement _alpm_find_dep_satisfiers instead of calling it (and introducing a new "wrapper").

I don't understand what you mean here, but feel free to take that patch, and rework it as you wish, then re-submit it on the ML.

There is no "real" problem with it (however, in my "programming taste" this implementation is a bit overkill;-), I've just tried to figure out why this hasn't been accepted yet. I did a little investigation, where find_dep_satisfier (which finds _all_ satisfier) is used: in find_pkg_satisfier, which is the replacement of what_provides. As I noted earlier, using find_pkg_satisfier instead of what_provides automatically enabled pacman -S 'dependency>=2.0', which is very useful imho: You can use this feature as dependency resolving in a script (e.g. makepkg). However, this cannot be documented yet (it is a super hidden feature ;-), because of a little edge case: The "literal first" rule doesn't work (versioned provision can be the first satisfier here). That's why I planned to share the "find literal, then find satisfier" part of resolvedeps between front-end and back-end. (In this case we need find_first_satisfier only, so find_dep_satisfier can be modified to do this). Now I ran into a problem: The front-end search for _all_ providers (satisfiers), and will stop if more than one was found. This is not compatible with resolvedeps behavior... So if we want to keep this, we cannot share the code (but can re-implement first literal, then satisfier). Or I can refer to the TODO in resolvedeps code: what to do in case of multiple provision? So my question: what do you think about this pacman -S 'dep>=2.0' idea, and if you like it, which implementation do you prefer? Bye