[SM-Discuss] alternative grimoire layout

Ladislav Hagara ladislav.hagara at unob.cz
Tue Apr 5 09:26:08 EDT 2005


> We add a new KEYWORDS variable to DETAILS that contains all the keywords
> that apply to this spell. There will be an official list of keywords that
> spells can use, no spell should use any other keyword.


Really good for searching.
On the other side we could only extend PROVIDES [1].
gaze provides X11-TERMINAL, gaze provides CONSOLE-EDITOR, gaze provides 
FTP-SERVER, SSH-SERVER, ...
BTW, "gaze list-provides" or better only "gaze provides" could print all 
"PROVIDES".

We could add also variable like COMMANDS or APPRENTICES to improve 
searching by name of commands provided by spell. [2]

> Sections are just a way to relate spells to maintainers, so we would have
> sections like eric_sandall, arwed_von_merkatz, ... and a section 
> unmaintained.

I do not agree. Developers are volatile. There is a big fluctuation.
Moreover it is quite demanding to change it in perforce.
Do not you remember when we changed perforce layout? It can take hours 
to sync to server.

Personally I do not like big changes in perforce.
It is quite difficult to check it and it is easy to accidentally 
remove/add important/risky files specially by novices.

> This opens up the possiblity of people maintaining a very small set of 
> spells
> they care about, which would make it less intimidating for new people to
> become maintainers.

We can have several maintainers of section (master and apprentices). It 
is not a problem.
Developer can just "p4 edit xxx" and he/she see if files are opened also 
by somebody else.

> The one drawback I see with this solution is that we lose the option 
> to browse
> the grimoire easily with the shell/filemanagers

IMHO it is a obstacle. Users like to browse sections for example by 
midnight commander.
I know users who browse them also by web browser. [2]

[1] http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=GenericDependences
[2] http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6861#c5
[2] http://download.sourcemage.org/codex/stable/

-- 
Ladislav Hagara

University of Defence
Computer Science Department
http://k269.unob.cz/

Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
http://www.sourcemage.org/



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