On Mar 7, 2008, at 9:07 PM, Oleg Terenchuk wrote:
difficulty when you have a project with many modules but not every module supports every version
While version-specific dependencies are actually hard (in spite of Gabor's message that the only problem is that the people who think this is easy don't do it), there is a possible solution that is relatively straight-forward. Install profiles should be packaged up with everything they depend on into a single tarball. This is a much more simple problem to solve than functionality in core (and on d.o) to handle version-specific dependencies in general. Every profile just needs a file that lists the exact versions of the modules that should be packaged up with it. Even if people aren't going to run the profile to install a new site, they could still use the tarball as a collection of the right versions of a bunch of modules that depend on each other. Not only is this a partial solution to the version dependency problem, it'd be a massive usability win for install profiles. I even started a bunch of discussions on g.d.o about exactly how this will work, and I'm planning to start a fund-raising campaign to raise sponsorship to implement it all. My goal is to have this working on d.o within a month or two, but I can't yet commit to a date. Cheers, -Derek (dww)