Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Jason Flatt wrote:
> It's been said (and I'm not disagreeing) that the Source Mage development 
> team
> is short handed.  Maybe you would like to help out by joining in?  If you
> have any skill at bash coding, I'm sure the sorcery team would appreciate 
> the
> help, even if it's only part-time.  At the very least, someone who can do
> testing to find bugs is certainly appreciated.
>
> I know on my system and I'm sure on others' as well, sometimes things work 
> or
> not because of anomalies, where the reverse is true for 'the rest of the
> world'.  Just because a spell successfully casts on my computer doesn't
> necessarily mean it will cast elsewhere.  This is mostly only true for
> dependencies, but occasionally for other things as well.
>
> So,  Jump in and help out.  (The same goes for you, too, Casey.)
>

Well put, and I'll offer help where ever I can (after finals of course
:-).

My first task is going to put together a few different test machines that
will spend their entire lives installing/casting/updating. I think a lot
of the features/bugs that effect only some of us, are a result of testing
on machines that either have been installed more/less recently, or updated
more/less often. I'll see what I can do about automating some of this,
e-mailing me the reports so I can investigate if something fails on one of
them.

I've got other plans as well which will be necessary to facilitate our
switch from Mandrake to SourceMage at work. The biggest obstacle here is
that our bigger network (only about ~15 machines) is 600 miles away. While
I've had pretty good luck managing most things via ssh, when a computer
loses net, it usually means driving out there. I'd like to create a
specialized rescue CD that will boot, try to get itself on the network,
and launch sshd. If a system-update renders a system unbootable, this
could help resolve the problem.

The problem described in my previous rant about grimoire stability (I
apologize if I offended anyone) I'm going to approach in two ways. First,
using a cluster of test machines (as described above). Second, I'm going
to create a small utility to allow me to create a custom grimoire by
pulling spells from the various other grimoires. This allows me finer
control over how things will get updated throughout our network.

I'd be happy to do some sorcery hacking as well, and will start searching
bugzilla for open bugs when time permits.

Anyway, here I am rambling away when I should be studying...

-casey