Re: [gentoo-dev] Council meeting 19 April 2010

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 04/08/10 15:29, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Apr 2010 05:02:25 -0700
> Brian Harring <ferringb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 4) if there are questions re: use cycle breaking or other bits, feel 
>> free to ask prior please- council meeting times unfortunately right 
>> now intersect badly with my paying work so it's hard to be online to 
>> answer questions during the meeting (that said per the norm I'll try).
> 
> Please detail your cycle breaking algorithm that works in such a way
> that it's guaranteed not to toggle flags that will break a system, but
> that does not require any changes to be made to ebuilds etc telling the
> package manager what those flags are.
> 
That would violate the Entscheidungsproblem.

But why would you make the cycle breaking depend on an oracle? Once we
have the method in place we can find the two special cases and think of
ways to fix them. Abandoning the idea as a whole just because there may
be a corner case that isn't as easy appears quite silly to me.

Brian's proposal is the only one I've seen that is deterministic and
sane, so I think we should figure out if we can improve it instead of
giving up at the first bump in the road.