Possible "stage" token for SCALLYWAG builds

[Jon Turney]

On 15/02/2023 21:48, Ken Brown via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> Jon,
> 
> When building TeX Live (once a year), I have to build texlive, 
> asymptote, and all the texlive-collection-* packages.  I currently can't 
> use SCALLYWAG to do the builds because these packages need to all be 
> deployed at once.  So I have to build them all locally, upload them to 
> my staging area, and then upload !ready files, one for x86_64 and one 
> for noarch.
> 
> It would be convenient for me if SCALLYWAG would accept a "stage" token 
> that would upload the files to my staging area without deploying them. 
> Then I could let SCALLYWAG do the builds, and I could upload the !ready 
> files when everything is staged.
> 
> If I'm the only maintainer who would find this useful, then I can 
> continue doing it the way I always have.  But maybe others would find it 
> useful too.

I'm not opposed to adding a some feature to support this if needed, but 
from the way you are describing it, this sounds more like a constraint 
that the dependency solver should be aware of.

(just because texlive-2023 and texlive-collection-foo-2023 are made 
available to download at the same time, doesn't mean that they always 
end up installed together, as the user might alter the version of one or 
the other)

If they really must be kept in lockstep to work correctly, then there's 
at least a couple of ways of doing that:

* give texlive an additional provide, such as texlive_2023, and make 
everything that requires it, require that (something similar is done 
with perl and perl modules)

* make things which require texlive do so with a version constraint like 
'requires: texlive (>= 20230000), texlive (<20240000)' (in theory this 
works, but I have no doubt that a bug will emerge when someone tries to 
use it, and ofc, it relies on the range of future versions which are 
compatible being correctly known in advance)

Assuming I've understood correctly, you might want to survey how other 
distros approach this problem.