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From: Harlan S. <Har...@pf...> - 2003-05-30 21:58:57
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I am working on some configuration management tools for a modules installation. I *think* I need to solve two problems. The first is "does X exist?", where X would be a module. This would be mostly used for dependency stuff. I will have to address version issues soon - phase 1 could be "does any version of X exist?", phase 2 could be "does X/1.2.3 exist?", and phase 3 could be "Do we have version 1.2.3 or later of X"? I think that I can solve all of these cases with something that says "give me the list of all versions of X that we know about." An empty list imples that we don't have X installed at all. It's then up to some other layer to implement the selection criteria (phases 1-3) described above. The 2nd problem has to do with getting paths. Sometimes while building software one needs a particular version of a tool. It may not be possible to simply prepend a module containing this tool to the PATH; indeed, we don't *know* if that tool's modulefile will prepend or append to the PATH, or how it will affect any other part of the environment. One can have a "nest" of disparate dependencies. So we may need an explicit path to the tool so we can use it during the build. Related to this problem is the issue of libraries and #include paths. I'm thinking that the baby step toward understanding this issue better (and making some progress) would be to have a way to get the path to the "top" of the installation area for a particular module, and from there one could: mp=`module path foo/1.2.3` and: CFLAGS+= -I$mp/include LDFLAGS+= -L$mp/lib PROG_FOO= $mp/bin/foo Thoughts or ideas please? H |
