Annvix Development Blog

There’s some really good news in ports-land tonight (this morning?). I’ve just got a preliminary dependency resolver implemented in the builder script along with a few other fixes and tweaks. It actually works quite nicely although I need to make it less prone to breaking and to handle deeper nested dependencies. This isn’t urgent as there’s only a few packages that have ports-based dependencies.

With annvix-ports 1.8, I built autogen (builder -p autogen), which required guile, which in turn required umb-scheme. builder did the right thing… it built and installed umb-scheme first, then guile, installed it, then built autogen. And was successful. =) Of course, if umb-scheme required something else, or if guile and autogen both required something else, I’m not sure how well it would hold up. Like I said, it’s preliminary, but it handles the scenario we currently have in ports (AFAIC, there are no other inter-ports-dependencies right now).

This is probably the biggest “issue” I had with ports, and it’s just been solved, which is nice. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s working and gives me the basis to tweak and refine it further although as things sit right now, until I have a more complicated “test scenario” I really can only theorize how it will work.

Of course, only 2.1-CURRENT is getting the new builder. 2.0-RELEASE is pretty much done; at the rate I’m going, if all goes well, 3.0-RELEASE will be available for Christmas. =)

I’ve just comitted some minor changes to annvix-ports to allow it to work with apt (since we no longer install urpmi per default, it makes sense that ports uses apt (which we do install by default) instead of urpmi).

Seems to work fairly well so far… ports is still “basic” and needs some work to handle dependencies on other ports packages, but this was needed to make it in any useable on a 2.0 “default” system (i.e. it just plain old didn’t work without urpmi installed).