Possible "stage" token for SCALLYWAG builds

[Ken Brown]

On 2/16/2023 7:13 PM, Ken Brown via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> On 2/16/2023 3:31 PM, Jon Turney wrote:
>> 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)
> 
> Thanks for the suggestions.  I think I should be able to make things 
> work with one or both of your ideas.

Just to finish this off for the sake of the archives, here's the 
solution I've decided on.  First, the only two packages that absolutely 
have to be in lockstep are texlive and texlive-collection-basic.  I 
achieve this as follows:

  - Make texlive provide tl_2023 and require tl_basic_2023.
  - Make texlive-collection-basic provide tl_basic_2023 and require tl_2023.

In addition, I prefer (but don't require) that the other 
texlive-collection-* packages stay in lockstep with texlive and 
texlive-collection-basic.  To this end,

  - Make the other texlive-collection-* packages require tl_basic_2023.

As long as I deploy texlive after all the collections, I get what I 
want.  Alternatively, I could deploy texlive-collection-basic after all 
the other collections.  If I forget to do one of those things, it won't 
be a disaster.

I've done some local testing, and this appears to work.

Ken