[pacman-dev] Chat with toofishes at jabber.org

[Xavier Chantry]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 7:06 PM, toofishes at jabber.org
<toofishes at jabber.org>wrote:

> 5:48 PM me: waoh, where does this come from ? :)
>   what made you implement epoch ?
>  toofishes: the stupid bug reports
>   clicked on one and went "ok we have three of these lets fix this shit"
> 5:49 PM it ended up not even being that much change, which was nice
>   had to fix a few things after running tests and such, but overall pretty
> straightforward
>  me: what was hard ? keep support for force ?
> 5:50 PM toofishes: yeah
>   ensuring both forward/backward support
> 5:51 PM me: the result looks pretty good and natural
>  toofishes: yeah
>   and eventually some of it can be cleaned up
>   can you spot the one drawback from this though? i didn't catch it at
> first, had to go back and fix my patch
>   you will laugh because you were talking about it the other day.
> 5:52 PM me: give me a hint, is it pacman related or makepkg/repo-add
>  toofishes: pacman
>   database releated
> 5:56 PM me: damn I cannot see, looking at the patch in be_files.c . and
> last thing I remember discussing about database was sanity check.
>   maybe bogus epoch values or something
>   force was just on/off
>  toofishes: no
>   we didn't have to read every desc file before
>   but now we do to always get the epoch value back
> 5:58 PM me: damn I actually spotted the vercmp call and force/epoch was in
> a different order
>   but I just thought force definitely looked weird
> 5:59 PM ok I mentioned slow db too, I never considered this depends/desc
> thing really. nagy mentioned it many times though
>   and I thought we were already fucked
>  toofishes: yeah
>   we just need to redo the db, tahts all :)
>

Nagy and I discussed a bit that topic.
Don't we already read all local depends file for conflict and/or dep
checking ?
So this means we'll now read all local depends + all desc files ?
Why not put epoch stuff in the local depends file then ?

IIRC there has been a plan for years to move replaces and force from depends
to desc, probably for sync db? and for similar reasons, but no one ever
dared to do it.

Another crazy thought, since epoch is really just a version extension, why
not define it as a version prefix or something ?
3.5.0 < 2#3.4 < 3#2.0
or whatever crazy syntax we can come up with. Then we just need to have
vercmp support that, and that's all, nothing complex to do in any database.

I am sorry this comes up a bit late, but only git code has been touched and
no harm has been made as far as I know, I just want to be sure that we
carefully considered all possible solutions for the stupid versioning some
projects use, and that we indeed chose the best way (epoch is probably
alright and better than force), but also the best implementation.