I'm still working out the deps for the new version of biber - I have them all now (more than 100 _plus_ LWP), including those needed at runtime and for testing, it's just a question of which (minor) dependencies need which other minor dependencies. At a guess, probably no more than 5 levels of dependencies. And I'm not bothering to separate runtime deps.
And some of the (many) perl module developers are less reliable than others - frequent new releases, sometimes severely changing the dependencies. What we have been doing is to only list versions for the top-level dependencies needed elsewhere in the book. The advantage of that is that we don't fill up the comparison report with random new versions of some minor depen dency. The downside is that any random change can alter the dependencies (that happened to me in the past week, took me ages to find out what was going on). And if/when that happens, the listed dependencies become incorrect. I'm increasingly thinking that we ought to list the version used for each dependency - and to NOT automatically check for new versions until either we are heading for a release, or until a package which uses something has a new release which needs a later version (biber tends to be good at that). The other problem with the perl modules page is that it is long and deep. Using versioned entities for everything would solve the depth (only one level of dependency per module) but probably increase the page length by at least two orders of magnitude. Igor's fork of the book was mentioned this week - He has moved his (three) modules into a separate chapter - although I think he is missing some dependencies for the one I looked at ;-) A separate chapter sounds like the way to go. Omitting texlive, and therefore biber, obviously has benefits. Changing this would be a major and protracted effort. I think *something* needs to be done, but my initial change to add unversioned entities for dependencies doesn't look as if it will help as much as I had hoped. And to be honest, if it wasn't for the pain caused by editing the biber deps I would much prefer to do more interesting things such as bringing TTF/OTF fonts under control. I saw that DJ added some modules without dependencies this week : if you are reading this, how did you find the experience ? Any alternative views ? For the meantime I'm still working through the biber deps, that will take some time and then I'll put them into the CURRENT page (versioned entities for top-level deps, unversioned entities where used by more than one other module). ĸen -- `I shall take my mountains', said Lu-Tze. `The climate will be good for them.' -- Small Gods -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
