[Debtags-devel] AI Tagger

[Thaddeus H. Black]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 05:14:52PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 03:08:43PM +0000, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> 
> > If uninteresting, please disregard (no reply is needed).  However, if it
> > is of interest, I happen to have a set of Perl modules which fully parse
> > and interrelate the Sources and Packages files, including versioned
> > dependencies, build dependencies, architecture limitations, virtual
> > packages, reverse Enhances, correct sequencing of version numbers,
> > versioned Provides, etc.  The modules go far deeper
> > libparse-debian-packages-perl.
> 
> If they can do reverse build-dependencies, then you really, really have
> to package them.

Such words are sweet to any free-software writer's ear.  Thank you.
However, where shall I find the time?  I am a much slower programmer
than you are, Enrico, and I've already enough free-software work planned
(including debtags) to fill my spare time for years to come; yet I would
feel embarrassed to package Perl modules when a proper implementation
would be done in C++ with libpcre.

> There's no decent tool to compute reverse build-dependencies, and
> that would be greatly helpful the QA and security people, for tasks such
> as "this library is broken, so it's likely to break all the packages
> that build with it: what are they?".

Well, the modules currently don't compute reverse build-dependencies,
but they do compute reverse Enhances even through the medium of an
(optionally versioned) virtual package name.  Algorithmically this is
essentially the same problem.  Hence, with a minor modification I
believe that your idea is possible with these modules.

I had better post my code now, hadn't I, in case someone wants to
inspect it (you don't need to unless you want to).  I have just assigned
it upstream version number 0.1.0, added to it a brief README with a
GPL-2 copyleft grant, tarred and gzipped it, and posted it
at [http://b-tk.org/].  This is alpha software.

-- 
Thaddeus
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