Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>]

I have a feeling I'm getting myself into trouble here but :

Why are spells physically grouped into grimoires? Why not have a SECTION 
tag in the DETAILS file to define what section it comes from ie. for 
gthumb SECTION=gnome, mozilla SECTION=http? Plus you could have multiple 
sections for gthumb SECTION[0]=graphics, SECTION[1]=gnome.

Why not download a single file (maybe call this the grimoire) which 
lists all available spells? This file may have 6 fields for each spell: 
spellname, versions available, lastupdated, sections its associated to, 
description, dependencies. Then each spell is tarred up (i.e. 
gthumb-2.2.2-spell.tar.bz2, mozilla-1.4-spell.tar.bz2). When you cast a 
spell it would check the spell list, check you have the most uptodate 
spells and it's dependencies, if required it would download the latest 
spells, sources and cast them?

When you do a sorcery update it would download the spell list file, 
check for differences between the lastupdated field local and remote 
copies of spells available on your machine and download the spells that 
need updating. This can reduce bandwidth. You only need the spells you 
used on your machine, ie. no kde spells.

Duane.