[sword-devel] Unified module lists

[Greg Hellings]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Jaak Ristioja <jaak at ristioja.ee> wrote:
>
> Use the repository identifier together with the module identifier, if
> required.
>
> Am I correct that what you are currently trying to work around is how
> Sword stores the modules on disk? Because I don't see any big
> obstacles to communicating the repository information to the user if
> multiple repositories have modules with the same identifier. For
> example, Portage on Gentoo Linux has recently been using the
> ::repository suffix for ebuilds.
>
> I suggest looking into how other multiple-repository package managers
> have solved this and not reinvent the wheel. :)

SWORD already provides a constructor for SWMgr that allows you to
specify which directory that manager should store files in. Creating
one per repository should be a trivial thing. So why have people long
claimed that allowing a single, unified module view would be
difficult? This is nothing more than a straightforward process of
creating multiple SWMgr objects and taking the union of their modules
by combining identifiers in-memory once they've been read from disk
(e.g. with a prefix/suffix of the source repository combined with the
module identifier). I've never understood what the challenge is that
people cite regarding this process. Can someone enlighten me?

--Greg