Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergeyli AT pisem.net>]

I've been thinking about the situation where updates to glibc, gcc, and 
other huge spells break too many bones. My idea is to introduce an extra 
flag, similar to "don't collect docs" or "don't archive the spell", 
which would mean "don't update without explicit agreement from the 
admin". Initialli, all "Solo" spells will have to be marked as such. So, 
every time the admin does "sorcery system-update" and, for instance, gcc 
needs an recompile, s/he would be asked if it's OK to do that. Holding 
the spall is not working because nobody cares to actually go and hold 
the spells that are critical, partially because not everyone knows what 
is s/he supposed to be holding. Mozilla could use the same "explicit 
update consent" because it's just too damn big and takes forever to 
compile, so does OpenOffice and Javs SDK.
Or this could be an option to sorcery, or just let the admin know that 
the update's here and whenever s/he is ready please use such and such 
command to update it (I mean, print "cast -c glibc" out and let the 
person think).

Which, BTW, brings us to the discussion of interactive/non-interactive 
option for sorcery/cast/etc, but that's an entirely different story...

Ideas?

Sergey.