[Distutils] developing & managing multiple packages with dependencies

[anatoly techtonik]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Brad Allen <bradallen137 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, I am looking for stories here from other organizations as a
> source of lessons. However, maybe it would help if I spent more time
> describing what we're trying to accomplish.
>
> We're a medium size software product company (over 100 employees), the
> supported platforms are Linux and Windows servers, and most of our
> package dependencies are internal. However, we also have third party
> open source dependencies.
>
>> For what is is worth keep a central repository for dependencies (either external or
>> internally produced) and enforce it with an iron fist or thinks will go pretty
>> quickly out of control (project A depends on project B and project C on project B' but
>> projectB and projectB' cannot be used at the same time).
>
> With a DVCS it makes sense to have multiple repositories (a repo for
> each package, er, I mean 'module distribution'), though we do have a
> centralized workflow with a central server containing all the repos.

You may be interested to take a look how Chrome manages it's
dependencies with gclient - "A script for managing a workspace with
modular dependencies that are each checked out independently from
different repositories".
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/depottools

A little bit tweaked it can be used to track newer commits in source
repositories to give you a hint when a checkpoint in your config file
can be moved forward. Starting with this you may further mark packages
as autoupdating etc.
-- 
anatoly t.