Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 4th Jun 2007 16:38 UTC, submitted by anonymous
"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller
packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable,
and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide
concrete benefits to end users."
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RE[2]: Solving the wrong problem
by christucker on Mon 4th Jun 2007 19:21
in reply to "RE: Solving the wrong problem"
Member since:2007-06-04
I would argue that OPIUM is much simpler than APT in the way it solves dependencies. :-) We make a trivial rewriting of the problem into a logical form, and then just throw it at an off-the-shelf solver to give us an answer. No mucking about with traversing graphs, choosing which path to take, back-tracking, or anything. Sometimes simplicity comes from an elegant new representation, not from a reduction in flexibility or power.
RE[3]: Solving the wrong problem
by Tom5 on Mon 4th Jun 2007 20:41
in reply to "RE[2]: Solving the wrong problem"
Member since:2005-09-17
I would argue that OPIUM is much simpler than APT in the way it solves dependencies.
Simpler, but with the same problems.
As I understand it, your success criteria is that the new package is installed and a minimum of other packages are removed. So, if I ask OPIUM to install "abiword" and it removes "gimp" in the process then that is a successful (and optimal) installation as far as the paper is concerned.
To a user, that probably looks more like failure! The real optimal solution is to install abiword without uninstalling anything.
RE[4]: Solving the wrong problem
by leibowitz on Mon 4th Jun 2007 23:28
in reply to "RE[2]: Solving the wrong problem"
Member since:2006-10-17
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Member since:
2005-07-12
I completely agree.
Package manager seem to get increasingly complex while they should strive for simplicity.
Zeroinstall has my support.