[Aptitude-devel] external solver support?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 08:15:48PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>   I just wanted to post what my general plans are for the aptitude 0.5.0

Hi Daniel,
  many thanks for this mail, it was a worth read not only for Arthur
after all ;)

>     * Dependency resolver.

I feel the need to hack into this. A while ago, even though in private
mail, we start discussing about the possibility of an ABI to interact
with solvers external to aptitude. The goal is on one hand to support
external solvers as plug-ins to be able to easy experiment with new
solving algorithms without messing up with aptitude itself.

On the other hand we already have (too) many package dependency solvers
in Debian (apt, aptitude, pbuilder, ...) and it would be wonderful to
factorize them out of the package manager codebase. I've already
discussed with the APT developers about this and they are interested as
well.

Even though we are at 0 with the design of the interface, I'm wondering
whether you are interested in adding this as a perspective feature for
aptitude 0.6.0.

That said ... it's time to start discussing the possible interface :)
Even though the ABI, in my mind, is meant to be common across package
managers, AFAICT aptitude will be the package manager with the most
complex requirement to address, so it is probably worth to start the
discussion here and then see how to converge to simpler package
managers.

Comments?

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
I'm still an SGML person,this newfangled /\ All one has to do is hit the
XML stuff is so ... simplistic  -- Manoj \/ right keys at the right time
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