Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

Again I'm saying things that may stir emotions, be it good or bad 
emotions. I sent this yesterday but I couldn't find it in the mailing list.

If we create a STABILITY tag in the DETAILS file then we can remove the 
stable, testing, devel grimoires. It's basic use will have it set to 
stable, test, or devel. I think it would be more advantageous to give it 
a percentage, let's call it a stability factor. The great thing is this 
stability factor can be set using a user feedback system or by the 
gurus. The feedback system may work like so. Everytime, a user casts a 
spell the details about whether the cast succeeded ot failed is appended 
to a report file. The user can then choose to submit this report to 
sourcemage, where sourcemage uses it to generate stability factors for 
spells. Here is an example of how it may work:

There are three mozilla spells:
mozilla-1.2:  99 out of it's 100 users have cast is successfully, 
therefore STABILITY=99
mozilla-1.3:  800 out of it's 1000 users have cast is successfully, 
therefore STABILITY=80
mozilla-1.4:  300 out of it's 500 users have cast is successfully, 
therefore STABILITY=60

If I have set my stability level to 75 then when I cast mozilla it will 
cast mozilla-1.3 and not mozilla-1.4 until it's stability level has 
increased above 75.

I can choose to force a cast of mozilla-1.4 before its stability factor 
reaches 75. The result of this cast will get added to the report which I 
will submit to sourcemage, which would increase it's stability factor if 
successful. I could also manually add to the report whether it's usable 
even though I was able to cast it. For example, I cast mozilla 1.4b the 
other day, the spell cast OK, but I couldn't use mozilla it was missing 
the mail client, reply windows, etc...

I am interested in criticisms, ideas on improvements, etc from others.

This idea is similar to my previous one about including a SECTION tag. I 
don't understand why we physically group spells together.

Duane.