Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Pradier <pradierdavid AT yahoo.fr>]

I proposed something to the sm-users list, some times ago, here is a part of 
it :

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Is it possible to make an engine on the website www.sourcemage.org to propose 
new spells ?

Let me describe how it could work :
Somebody with a new spell uploads it to the website, compressed, selects in 
which section(s) it should go, and gives his email address.
The engine uncompresses it, based on the extension, and puts it in a new 
codex 
named something like "proposed" ; the tarball is re-calculated and available 
for everybody, just like "test" or "devel" or "stable".

Why is it better than our current system ?
Currently, we can grab the proposed spells on the mailing-list, generally i 
wait for the official version, only because it's boring to go through the 
process save/uncompress/move before being able to test it ; and when i do a 
system-update, the spell has disappeared !
And i don't always look for new spells, as a user. And sometimes, i think, 
"wow, it should be cool to test it, but i just haven't the time right now" 
and after, i have forgotten it.
So, it would mean that every user could test new spells, and so, we would 
have 
better tests than only the one of the maintainer :-) (i don't mean that 
maintainers make bad test, but every computer is different, isn't it ;-) ?)
For the maintainers, it would be easier (i think) to see and test 
automatically a spell waiting in their section :-) ; no need to parse the 
mailing-list.
And we know that sometimes, some spells aren't seen by the maintainer, just 
because mailing-list isn't the best tool for this, i think.

I don't propose to implement this myself, because i wouldn't know where to 
begin.
Do you think it's a good idea ? Do you think it's hard to implement ?
What do you think ?

David/day

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This kind of thing seems relatively easy to do to me... immediate features
that come to mind is an automatic notification of a section maintainer
whenever a spell is "proposed" to their section, along with the ability
for maintainers to "download new spells since their last checkout",
"download a specific spell", "spell approved for devel grimoire" (aka
"remove this spell from proposed"), "reject spell" (with a comment box for
the reason why), etc.  Of course there is an inherant security risk as
people could use an invalid email address and submit a trojan as a spell.

In short, this would be possible to do if people think it would be useful.
I'm not sure how long it would take me as I'm not sure how much free time
I would have for this.

(Just brainstorming out loud :)

[jonathan evraire]