Google Summer of Code 2009: Mentors needed!

[Joshua Root]

Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
>>> 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.)
>>
>> Yep.  I think what we ultimately need is a tuple containing port,
>> version, variant-list which gets looked at in satisfying any
>> dependencies, and we make the "binding precedence" follow the same
>> order:  First you look for port, then you look for version, then you
>> look for (if the depending port even specifies a preference) the
>> specific variant.  If the port has declared one or both of the latter
>> two items as "soft" dependencies, or has wild-carded them somehow, you
>> can also fall back to a non-exact match rather than forcing a build of
>> that specific tuple.  Of course, since things also depend on the depot
>> locations rather than the bits in ${prefix} in my crazy idea, it also
>> means that you can have multiple variants of a given port installed at
>> the same time, so all you're burning is some extra disk space and CPU
>> time in the interests of a more exact functional match.
> 
> Sounds like a good time to get sqlite support running.

It's always been a good time. ;-) There are lots of bugs and enhancement
requests that need registry2.0.

- Josh