standard dependancy system

[Tuomo Valkonen]

On 2007-11-23, Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec at suse.cz> wrote:
> I see that for example configure.ac already contain some of these
> information, but in a form, which is machine executable, but machine can
> not parse and understand it. You can do post-mortem analysis of
> config.log and try to guess, what was really needed.
>
> I can even imagine modification of automake to create part of such
> meta-description while calling ./configure.

I have written some thoughts about a decentralised capability-based
packaging _and_ build system [1]. As presented, it is however still
far from complete, certainly not ready for implementation. I have
since writing that developed these ideas a bit further, but I don't
really have the time to actually pursue this line of research much
further very fast by myself, let alone implement this thing. 
As mentioned in the posting, such core software really needs a lot
input before implementing something flawed that it will be difficult
to fix later on. I suspect there might be even, say, a PhD thesis
worth of work still. Nix-package [2] has some very useful/related
ideas, although it is unfortunately not decentralised, and not really
a full build system either.

  [1]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2007/07/16/T22_41_22/

  [2]: http://nix.cs.uu.nl/

-- 
Tuomo