Feature: Explicit dependency management

[ewollesen]

At present, dependency management between projects is limited and implicit.

As an example, the harbor project is dependent on the distribution project. How is that dependency specified? It's a combination of non-obvious Makefile magic: Loc #1 and Loc #2 and Loc #3.

There is, at present, no way to specify any sort of version for the dependency. This means that Loc 3 above is ordering-dependent. If distribution isn't built before harbor, then harbor could be built with the incorrect version of distribution. That requirement isn't explicitly captured anywhere.

If the two projects are built in parallel, then the dependency is again possibly broken (e.g. make -j$(nproc) build-all-projects).

While the current system is functional, it seems very unlikely that it will be able to meet the future needs of the EKS-A Curated Packages team. Having the means to specify dependencies in an explicit manner, including versions or build identifiers will be important.

As an added bonus, we may be able to safely parallelize builds for a potential speedup.

/cc @jaxesn @vincentni