Re: bundles

Stig S. Bakken wrote:

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 09:27, Lukas Smith wrote:

Let me brainstorm some related topics. Currently we have alot of packages that support different backends, optional security improvements etc. Especially for the different (database) backends alot of packages already support 3 difference abstraction layers and usually users only want one. So for that users will eventually be able to select what they want at install time. Now the question is if we want to enable users to set those selections globally similar to how gentoo allows you to. So setting the global option "DB" would set the "only install the DB backend if relevant" for every package being installed.

There is a "provides feature" thingie in package.xml that can be used to express meta-functionality. The idea is stolen^Wborrowed from rpm, where you can specify a dependency like "this package needs a web server", rather than "this package needs apache".

<deps>

    <dep type="feature" name="template-system"/>
    <dep type="pkg" optional="yes" name="HTML_Template_IT"/>
    <dep type="pkg" optional="yes" name="HTML_Template_Flexy"/>
    <dep type="pkg" optional="yes" name="HTML_Template_Foobar"/>

</deps>

ok i wasnt even thinking of that .. i was more thinking about sort of the opposite case .. a package provides a file, a database and an xml container and I have a global flag that tells pear only to install the xml backend. actually the example probably makes even more sense with the db, mdb and mdb2 backends some packages support ... there it seems even more sensible for users to say they always only want one of the drivers .. then again why fuzz over a few files extra :-) regards, Lukas