[gentoo-portage-dev] portage-ng design competition -- not yet

[Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 02:58, George Shapovalov wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 December 2003 15:08, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> > I haven't looked at twisted, but a good solution suggested by nerdboy is
> > to have a design competition once we have the requirements finalized.
> 
> So, we are going to do it according to "accepted practices" :).
> Seriously, I am glad to see it! And here is my entry ;).

Everyone, please note above that I said "have a design competition *once
we have the requirements finalized*." This hasn't happened yet. Please
focus on the capabilities you want in Portage first. Tell us about
these. These need to be documented first. Any design competition will
not begin until it is officially announced and until we have a set of
requirements for any submitted design to be judged by.

We need to clearly determine what we are shooting for before we choose a
language to get us there.

That being said, ADA is something I'd be comfortable with if the
proposed implementation can meet our requirements, and will be seriously
considered, and we will post george's proposal for ADA to the portage-ng
pages in the proper time (again, when he has the opportunity to see a
complete set of requirements for submissions, and explain how his
implementation would meet those requirements.) 

But please, we have not decided on prolog, there is no need to
pre-emptively bash it (no pun intended.) Focus on submitting requests
for what you want portage-ng to be able to *do*, not what language you
think it should be coded in.

Look at it this way (this is something nerdboy explained to me) -- if we
have a solid set of requirements, we could have those requirements
implemented in *any* language, and as long as our requirements are met
fully, we would be happy with the outcome. That is what we want our
requirements to do for us, and why they are so important. I don't want
to add any "rigged" requirements that are designed to steer us towards
prolog, C, C++, python, ADA or anything else. Let's just document
clearly what we need and what we expect portage-ng to be able to do, and
the rest will be sorted out later.

If portability is important, put that in the requirements. Performance?
Put it in the requirements. etc etc. Choice of a particular language
over another will not guarantee that the resultant software will meet
our needs. Having something documented in the requirements will.

Regards,

Daniel

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