A new dependency resolver
Create an entire new dependency resolver to help solve #22 (closed) and #23 (closed) because, well, why not?
Or rather: I felt that issue #23 (closed) was sufficiently 'nasty' that, well, drastic action might be required. I did not see how I could modify to 'fix' the old dependency resolver to cope with Qt5 and given that the failure mode of #23 (closed) seemed so bizarre and inexplicable to me I did not 'trust' that code to be all that solid in the first place. Also, it seemed a pity that the output of the old dependency resolver basically threw away all the information so it could not be used for introspection features easily.
So, a new dependency resolver then. The new one tries to be simpler in that the work is split into more distinct steps. Instead of returning a list of modules sorted into build-order, it returns a graph (a hash keyed by module name).
Additional functions are provided to:
- convert the graph into a sorted list of modules in build order
- walk the graph as a tree (for introspection)
The new approach for dependency resolution works in multiple distinct steps:
- Resolve the entire set of modules, and construct the graph data structure
- Break certain well-known dependency cycles due to imperfect metadata.
- Check if any circular dependencies remain
- Vote for dependencies, by which each module 'upvotes' its dependencies (directly or indirectly through transitive dependencies). This effectively creates a complete map of back edges for each module in the graph. The vote is used for sorting into build order: the more popular modules should get sorted first.
The new approach may be said to have the following advantages:
- It does not need to croak_internal() as often: errors can simply be dealt with by returning an error code/object. This is particularly important for the make-it-mojo effort: it would be rather bad if dependency resolution failure meant the entire kdesrc-build server process croaked there and then.
- The graph structure is exposed and permits much better introspection of what kdesrc-build is doing with dependencies.
- Subjectively: by using distinct steps there is less seemingly unrelated interaction between various functions going on.
- It should therefore be relatively easy to write good unit tests for the functions without requiring much outside setup/mocking. (I know nothing about writing unit tests in Perl.)