lex at cc.gatech.edu wrote:
> And as a small request, please don't call these versioned thingies
> "dependencies".  A dependency is a directional relationship where one
> item *must* or *probably must* have the other.  Something like "A 1.3
> works with B 1.2" is not directional and does not imply any necessity. 
> This is more like a "configuration", or perhaps a fragment of a
> configuration, plus a rubber stamp of approval.

Mm... agreed.  Actually, I think Goran has been calling them 
configurations or something along that line.

 >Julian Fitzell wrote:
>>I'm not saying it's necessarily perfect or easy, but I like it quite a 
>>bit more than what you seem to be describing and I'd give it a fighting 
>>chance of working. 
> 
> 
> Wait, now you're making it sound like they are in conflict again....  I
> hope that is just an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Well, like I said, I was having trouble figuring out exactly what you 
were propsing and taking issue with.  I'm not actually sure there is a 
conflict: it seems like you just want to be able to load the newest 
version of all the packages and there's certainly shouldn't be anything 
preventing you from doing that.

> As a thought experiment, though, did you try tracing through the example
> I posted?  I immediately got hung up with just 3 packages being
> considered; after several steps I could still not upgrade any of the
> packages without breaking the considerations.  The only ways out were to
> ignore the "dependencies" or to make all the packages move together in
> lockstep.  Why don't you try tracing through an example of your own
> and see how it goes?

I assume you mean the example involving Collections, A, and B?  I did 
read through it, and I just assumed you *would* ignore the 
"configurations"/"dependencies" if you thought you knew better.  I mean, 
either the packages in your image all work with the newest version of a 
dependency, or they don't.  If they do, then you can load it, whether or 
not anyone has marked it as a known working configuration; if they 
don't, then obviously you have a problem.

I don't see ignoring the configurations as a problem.  On a related 
note, there also seemed to be talk of allowing any user to post 
configurations.  Obviously you could configure your UI to only (or 
preferentially) trust configurations from package maintainers, but you 
could also choose to follow other people's experiences if you were more 
into the bleeding edge.

Julian