Garance A Drosihn wrote:

No, you don't need a cluster.

I think people are not understanding the problem.

The problem is that a change to the system breaks the build of a package.

What this means is that you should be able to:

1) Build all the packages on a system 2) Install everything that wasn't automatically installed as a dependency

This gives you a system where all the *port* dependencies of any randomly selected port are pre-satisfied, so the building can take place independently from any other port.

It's about getting to the point where the dependencies are presatisfied.

The ports cluster is not about that. It's all about ensuring that no dependencies are lost, or implicitly satisfied.

Effectively, you could get very close to a system that could be used to build all the ports in parallel, in their own directory, by simply installing all the packages in existance. You really don't give a damn that the installed *binaries* of a port on which you depend for actual operation would end up being different, too. So you break the need for dependency order enforcement between different ports.

In very simple terms:

o The point of the ports cluster is to make sure that dependencies on other ports aren't broken

o The point of this system would be to make sure that dependencies on the system aren't broken

Two very different problems. The solution of the first needs a ports cluster to be able to solve it within about 8 hours. But the much of that 8 hours is based on dependency ordering that you can throw away, if you are trying to solve the "system changed" problem, rather than the "ports changed" problem.

Make sense?

-- Terry

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