[pacman-dev] [patch] testdb, reworked

[Xavier]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 01:30:05PM +0200, Nagy Gabor wrote:
> OK. I try to explain what my problem is:
> If I send a patch, I have the feeling that it will be committed without
> modification or rejected. But this is a teamwork, so you can improve/fix my
> patch before commit. I don't care if you modify my patch, I don't care if my
> name is not listed as patch-author etc.; I suppose that before committing all
> accepted patch is carefully read, so fixing/improving is not an extra work IMHO,
> so I suggest to do that.
> For example, there are parts in my big checkdeps/alpm_sync_prepare patches which
> I don't like (the 2in1 remove+upgrade list loop for example); but that parts are
> unimportant; and (1.) I trust on your creativity and (2.) I couldn't do it better.
> Back to the current patch:
> First of all, I'm not a programmer, so I have few experience in c-programming.

I don't have any programming experience in C either (besides pacman).
Maybe that's the problem.
I didn't like much the 2in1 remove+upgrade list loop, and I think Dan didn't
either.
I tried a while ago to handle it in another way, but it was a dead end. And
then I gave up..

> And to tell the truth I was never interested in "programming language syntaxes",
> I'm interested in algorithmic problems instead. So I _knew_ that my patch is not
> perfect, but I hoped that it will be helpful (it points to some bugs and its
> concept is (hopefully) good.); but I also knew, that even a 5-year-old kid can
> fix it, if he knows C static/public/whatever syntax and alpm function-naming
> conversions.
> 

If it was only the naming that was problematic, I would have fixed it. But
there are other things that disturbed me.

I already noted the conflict checking on my TODO list for testdb the first
time you suggested it.
I didn't do it yet for the reasons I already mentioned in this thread, that I am
not satisfied with the current libalpm conflict checking interface.
And also the asymetrical storing problem.

For the other pkg->requiredby bug, I also replied, but AGAIN, I am
clueless about what the correct fix is. My proposal was to duplicate the list
before sorting it in testdb.

I'm beginning to think that pacman was probably already a too complex project
to start with, I always have to ask about how things should be done, and I'm
very rarely able to come up with a patch I'm happy with.
So I'm progressively losing the little motivation I had in the beginning.
I also find it sad that pacman gets so little attention / is so short of
manpower.