RE: Readying CHANGES file in preparation for release.

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

----Original Message----
>From: Brian Dessent
>Sent: 03 June 2005 07:24

> On a somewhat unrelated note, a while ago I was playing around with the
> script that I'd wrote that converts setup.ini into a directed graph in
> the 'dot' language for input to GraphViz.  One of the GraphViz utilities
> will do a 'transitive reduction' on a graph.  This means that if you
> have A -> B -> C (where in this context A -> B means 'A requires B')
> then you can eliminate the edge A -> C if it exists.  The setup.ini
> graph contains approximately 500 nodes and 1800 edges, and after running
> the transitive reduction it contains only ~900 edges.  This means that
> roughly half of all packages specified in 'requires' lines are redundant
> information.  Not that I'm advocating that maintainers should somehow be
> responsible for knowing or finding these redundancies (since a lot of
> them are probably non-obvious) but I did find it interesting that there
> were that many transitive edges.

  I don't think you can draw any real conclusion from that fact.  In our
graph, if we have a->b, b->c and a->c, that doesn't mean you can eliminate
a->c, because some future release of package b might no longer depend on c.


    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....