duration of the ports freeze

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 04:10:14PM -0500, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
>> This is due to thinking of the port system as one would of as say
>> make(1) namely a multistage transaction vs. one big atomic
>> transaction.   Doing first makes each port responible for most it's
>> knowledge and thus open to inconsistencies and the other makes so the
>> port is nothing but a node in a graph with the edges holding most of
>> the knowledge instead of the nodes.
>
> You continue to complain that the current dependency system is broken
> but you have yet to provide an alternative.

Right off the top my head a simple DFS or topo sort with approriate
knowledge in the edges would suffice.
>
>> If there was a universal way of handling stuff as recommended in
>> Miller97 and most decent algorithm books.
>
> You also regularly references to Aegis - again with no explanation as
> to what problem Aegis would solve and how it would solve it.  I recall
> hearing Peter Miller present his paper at AUUG'97 and I know I was
> interested enough at the time to install and experiment with Aegis but
> (for reasons I don't recall any longer), I have since reverted to make.

First of all he was refering to cook not aegis (aegis is his
alternative to CVS).   I stopped using also because the scripting
language is really badlly layed out semantically (basically he tried
to get a functional language into the syntax of an imparative one).
Other then that it is actual quite good.  The altenrative is unlike
make which does basically this:

select some target
    check all dependancies on the target recursivally using this algorithm
    if all depends are uptodate bring the target up to date

This has the weaknesses offered in the paper and other large recursive
single node graph processors... yes they can solve a maze but only by
trial and error instead of attempting essentially an all paths
solution before selecting the optimal one (namely a well made cook
project guarantees the spanning tree in all cases where make almost
guarantees a non-span tree for any non-trivial source tree)... a
careful read of Rivest-Korman-et. al. chapter on graphs will show the
same conculsion... for a quick and dirty guide on cook read the
tutorial I wrote on the cook site (Peter's main site not the aegis one)


- --
Aryeh M. Friedman
FloSoft Systems
Developer, not business, friendly
http://www.flosoft-systems.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHUeTz358R5LPuPvsRAuxxAJ0coFqpc7wyX9+k7rGLNPwxLxgU/gCeKYTZ
YQ+1nd5ttJPoYfIrXPKUWRg=
=MbCp
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----