Just when you think you are finished something pops up and bites you. As I was getting ready to do the release to my beta customers I noticed that some of my unit tests in the dependency code no longer passed. I had made some changes the week before to alter conflict reporting and I guess I for got to run the tests. Well I jumped in and started debugging. An hour or so latter whop-a-mole with bugs I realized that the core algorithm was wrong. Leaky edge cases are almost always a symptom of an underlying fault in the logic. In almost all of these cases about the only thing you can do is through out the existing implementation and start fresh.
Well, in this case, I wrestled with a creating a new solution with little or no luck. Eventually, I went to lunch with some friends to talk out the problem. We, or more specifically Scott Parish, realized that at its core this is a backtracing problem very similar to that Prolog was designed to handle. Fortunately, he had just spent the last month living and breathing a similar backtracing problem and volunteered to code up a solution. He took the core of his solution from chapters 11 and 12 of PAIP. It seems that Erlang, due to its immutability, makes for a very good platform for these types of issues. In any case, Later on that night he sent me the solution that turned out to be a special cut down, special purpose prolog interpreter. Even then it was a complete, fast solution that occupied no more then a hundred lines of code. I am working on getting it integrated back into the build system as I write this. Its amazing how simple and concise an elegant solution can be.
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