Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 17:39, Jason Flatt wrote:
> Since I'm not /exactly/ sure what a tinderbox is/does, I may be off base
> here, but on the assumption that it is basically a machine which simply
> goes through the entire grimoire (all grimoires?) and casts each and every
> spell, there is still the high possibility that there will be bugs that
> will be undetected.  Many of the spells have weird or complicated
> dependencies that may not show any problems during an automated cast.
>
close enough to what it is, yes dependancies are going to be hard to sort 
out, 
same with CONFIGURE. Ideally a tinderbox would capable of recasting a spell 
with each different option and then move on to the next spell. Also it might 
be necessary to dispel back down to basesystem regularly to catch unlisted 
dependancies.
> Also, dependencies may be installed for one spell and not removed that are
> needed for another spell which does not include them.  That bug would not
> show up, 'cause the packages were installed by a previous spell.
>
I have thought about this and wondered if after each cast a tinderbox could 
ldd the libs and binaries , "cut" the output to the lib name, gaze from 
"that_name" , grep DEPENDS for that package ,add that package to a queue for 
emailing to the MAINTAINER if it isn't already in DEPENDS.
This won't really help with headers but would be a good start ?

> I don't think it's a bad idea, but I do think it will need some serious
> thought and hand-holding until whoever is doing it is fairly certain that
> most (if not all) of those odd situations will be found.
>
> Now I think I need to stop trying to reply to e-mail and go to sleep.
I think this is a mammoth task and should be fully roadmapped first , for 
"maximum future-proofing" but in the long term would give us such superior 
stability and shorten our development cycle (spell testing) so dramatically 
we would be criminal not to consider it.
In fact we are having a lot of these sort of discussions lately, is this just 
normal in an open development environment ? Or are we moving into unmapped 
territory ?
Hamish
- -- 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/DnAt8fSufZR6424RAkyyAJ9zUsQN4088qfBxSxNiBjaGBmPzfACeJs+y
tmuD55GL8B4zBzIscglIqRw=
=8dI0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----