Google Summer of Code 2009: Mentors needed!

[Joshua Root]

Rainer Müller wrote:
> Rainer Müller wrote:
>> Also, if you have a specific idea what could be improved in MacPorts,
>> but you never had the time to do it yourself, please put a proposal on
>> our ideas page. I already cleared up the list from the last year and
>> there are still interesting and important projects on it. And we need
>> mentors for these, of course.
>>
>> Ideas page: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode
> 
> I have no clue about this task here:
>   http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode#images
> 
> Can anybody explain why that would be useful? In my opinion, linking to
> the depot would be bad as every dependent port would break on an
> upgrade, even if you only changed variants. Should we keep it on the
> ideas page?

This was one of Jordan's crazy ideas IIRC, and there's a reason it's
classified as very challenging. The idea, as I understand it, is that
you wouldn't be able to uninstall the old version when something is
linked against it.

This project of course requires the ability to depend on specific
version ranges of ports (being able to exclude both too old and too
new), and likewise with variants. There would also need to be a way to
manage rebuilds when existing software would work with a newer version,
and you want to get rid of the old one. (And other such interactions
involving variants etc.)

- Josh