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I think it has more to do with the complexity. Minimum version selection is trivial to implement and understand. The processing time is a side-note.

by icholy 9y ago

Groxx 9y ago
MVS is less complex to code, definitely agreed. But given how well studied and broadly implemented SAT is, I don't really think that's a useful distinction to its end goal - be a useful build system. Chucking the whole transitive-version-respecting thing is even simpler[1] but it's terrible and Go shouldn't do that just because it's simple. And for "understandability" in a conceptual sense, personally SAT has always felt simple and predictable to me - "find something within all bounds or err" is something we do all the time by hand. [1] e.g. pip essentially ignores version constraints if something's already installed or some other lib already mentioned it. it's absolutely terrible and causes many problems in anything long-lived.
- dilap 9y ago
  A non-SAT system is understandable in the sense that you can, as a human, look at it and understand what the solution is should be. That's kind of cool. It also seems within the realm of imaginable that having an easy-enough-to-implement scheme that you're not falling back on writing heuristic backtracking search might result in more tools being written. Obviously, you are right that being NP-complete is clearly not a showstopper or a huuuge problem, in practice. Still, seems nice to avoid if you can! By the way, that's interesting to hear about pip. I do my best to avoid python, but I inevitably end up reluctantly wanting to use some tool written in it, and inevitably it breaks. What a fucking shit-ass ecosystem.
  - Groxx 9y ago
    Re Python: pretty much :| My personal favorite is that, because of this behavior, you can install a single top-level package into a fresh virtualenv and get invalid transitive dependencies. Both in theory and in practice. If you ever get back into Pythonlandia, do check out pip-compile - it's a properly sane package manager, following the normal SAT solving path. Major lifesaver, 100% recommended. I enjoy the language well enough - it's readable and expressive. But it's so terrible for building a business on top of, and that's largely due to the ecosystem.

I think it has more to do with the complexity. Minimum version selection is trivial to implement and understand. The processing time is a side-note.

by icholy 9y ago

I think it has more to do with the complexity. Minimum version selection is trivial to implement and understand. The processing time is a side-note.

Groxx 9y ago

MVS is less complex to code, definitely agreed. But given how well studied and broadly implemented SAT is, I don't really think that's a useful distinction to its end goal - be a useful build system. Chucking the whole transitive-version-respecting thing is even simpler[1] but it's terrible and Go shouldn't do that just because it's simple. And for "understandability" in a conceptual sense, personally SAT has always felt simple and predictable to me - "find something within all bounds or err" is something we do all the time by hand. [1] e.g. pip essentially ignores version constraints if something's already installed or some other lib already mentioned it. it's absolutely terrible and causes many problems in anything long-lived.

dilap 9y ago
A non-SAT system is understandable in the sense that you can, as a human, look at it and understand what the solution is should be. That's kind of cool. It also seems within the realm of imaginable that having an easy-enough-to-implement scheme that you're not falling back on writing heuristic backtracking search might result in more tools being written. Obviously, you are right that being NP-complete is clearly not a showstopper or a huuuge problem, in practice. Still, seems nice to avoid if you can! By the way, that's interesting to hear about pip. I do my best to avoid python, but I inevitably end up reluctantly wanting to use some tool written in it, and inevitably it breaks. What a fucking shit-ass ecosystem.
- Groxx 9y ago
  Re Python: pretty much :| My personal favorite is that, because of this behavior, you can install a single top-level package into a fresh virtualenv and get invalid transitive dependencies. Both in theory and in practice. If you ever get back into Pythonlandia, do check out pip-compile - it's a properly sane package manager, following the normal SAT solving path. Major lifesaver, 100% recommended. I enjoy the language well enough - it's readable and expressive. But it's so terrible for building a business on top of, and that's largely due to the ecosystem.