Mancoosi Weblog

From 13 to 15 June, pkgsrcCon 2008 was held at the Technical University of Berlin, and MANCOOSI was there!

We presented our tools, and afterwards there was a good discussion about adapting them for pkgsrc. Look for pkgsrc support in the EDOS and MANCOOSI tools soon!

Being the natural evolution of EDOS, Mancoosi also aims at providing maintenance for the various tools and software developed during its predecessor. In this respect, a lot of work is going on under the hood: stay tuned, we'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, we have resurrected the Debian weather service. Looking at it you can get an idea of how the weather will be on a given Debian distribution and architecture. Would it be a good idea to go out today (i.e. perform an install/upgrade attempt) hoping in clear sky (i.e. low uninstallable package count), or would it be better to stay in bed waiting for the storm (i.e. high uninstallable package count) to fade away? Check your Debian weather now to see it!

Daniel points out that Maven is moving to SAT-solver technology too, and this is a second level offspring of EDOS, as it is inspired by the Eclipse P2 project we posted about last week.

So, good ideas travel fast!

One word of warning though for people out there following on the original EDOS ideas:

• we are not necessarily asking that you mention EDOS (that introduced all these ideas back in 2005) all the time (we kind of know that this spoils business advertising a bit); it would be kind to do it once in a while, though :-)
• please get in touch with us at Mancoosi, so we can make sure that the problem description format we are working on for the competition properly encompasses your usage cases, so you will be able to benefit from the competition results.

We have been interacting during EDOS with Daniel Le Berre, when the EDOS WP2 team first pointed out in 2005 that SAT solvers where the right tools to use to check for installability, solving dependencies and conflicts, of software packages in a GNU/Linux distribution.

But software components come in different flavours, and the very same problem arises in a wealth of other fields, so it has been a real pleasure to learn during the Mancoosi meeting in Paris this week that Sat4j (Daniel's SAT solver) will eventually become a part of the P2 project in Eclipse.

This is proof that we are heading in the right direction, as Industry is listening to Academia.

It is also wonderful news for Mancoosi, as we will have lots of potential new participants in the international solver competition which is one of the component of our project.