Re: NewVersion

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Lucas C. Villa Real
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Hugo Barrocas <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> I'm not a programmer :)
>>
>> I just considered that if I'm installing some program, and it fails to
>> install because it depend on some other program, that should be
>> inserted in the dependencies file.
>> I try to check it (whenever I recall), and it I spot that it didn't
>> auto-insert it, I enter it manually before uploading the recipe.
>
>
> Yeah, that manual procedure really sucks. A couple of alternatives I see to
> improve the generation of Dependencies files are:
>
> (1) to have a tool that parses configure.ac files and guesses which
> dependencies are mandatory based on the use of the AC_MSG_ERROR() macro, and
> (2) to borrow meta-data from other distros.
>
> The problem with the first is that configure.ac files can be quite complex
> (and often they are). But, in fact, this looks like a nice problem for
> programming language folks;  Hisham, Michael, does this sound like something
> a summer student of yours would be willing to embrace?
It's possible. Summer's a long way away and we won't know much about
the numbers until a lot closer. It probably needs a student with an
existing interest in Linux as well, which narrows things a bit, but it
seems feasible at least. Hisham and I should probably liaise on that,
actually - there's probably room to set up some coordination and
collaboration here.
> With the second approach, we would need to map package names used by other
> distros to the ones used by Gobo. Sounds feasible, but tedious to maintain.
I think this could be mechanised too - download the (say) Debian
package, see what files are in it, and find where those are. It should
almost always be the case that one Gobo package contains files from
multiple Debian packages, and not the other way around. They're both
viable experiments, anyway.
-Michael