Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

I started some work on this but got distracted/discouraged, here is what
I came up with in a rough nutshell (walnut?).

1 make a list of excluded/base spells
2 make a (big) list of all spells to be tested (excluding excluded/base
  system spell)
3 pick some random number of things from that list and remove them from
  it (probably storing it elsewhere for book keeping), shuffle this list
  for kicks (i even have a script for this already!)
4 cast them all, emailing about any failed cast, and lots of state info
5 after they all finish dispel "everything" (ie return to a known state)
6 update sorcery and grimoire, add missing (but not already tested and
  not excluded spells to list of things to cast)
7 repeat 3,4,5 and 6 until everything in the big list is gone. Send some
  email or something and goto 1

Pretty straight forward.

Im sure everyone has slightly different opinions on how this should
work. Keep in mind that we do in fact want to get through everything,
and that I was envisioning multiple tinderboxes.

I figured the randomness ought to make things a little more realistic
and weed out more bugs. It also make having multiple tinderboxes more
effective because they may find different bugs and will have greater
coverage of the entire grimoire, otherwise they become redundant and the
fastest tinderbox gets all the bug reports, followed by n-1 redundant
ones.

I tend to write many small scripts and programs, most of the list
processing junk I was doing in perl because its good at that stuff,
the more casting oriented stuff I would do in bash. All lists ought to
be written out to disk so that things can be recovered and continued in
the event of a power failure.

Im willing to collaborate (IRC meeting?) about this with all interested
parties. Maybe we could agree on a design, divide up the coding, toss
ideas around and such. Maybe we ought to setup an ad-hoc temporary team
for this while we develop it.

A side note idea I had was to make yet another script that would create
a chroot simulation smgl system. Then those of us who feel like donating
our cycles could help.

I think this will make our manpower a lot more effective/automated if
some portion of us do this. Just imagine the bugs we can produce!

Andrew