Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 11:39, Andrew wrote:
> I started some work on this but got distracted/discouraged, here is what
> I came up with in a rough nutshell (walnut?).

Yes it is daunting for me too

> 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

I though casting spells that depend on the "installed one" important too, to 
check for downwards compatibility? but i think you are right the original 
queue will need to be randomised in some way...

> 5 after they all finish dispel "everything" (ie return to a known state)

yes, but i just realised i left out cast --fix at this stage to see if 
anything important has been dispelled, if it has then we grep the install log 
dir and send that out via email also...

> 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.
>

You can have any colour you want , ... as long as it is black!

> 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.
>

Yes i think you are right, every tinderbox reproducing the same bugs would be 
slightly useless. 

> 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.

Yep every step needs to log itself, but as for writing the code i had yet to 
even start on that, i have trouble typing my own name so was going to keep it 
simple by using bash and bugging everyone else to help me :-)

>
> 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.

If a team is what takes your fancy, then sure,  can we call it "The 
FireBrigade" ?

> 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 know next to nothing about clustering so bow to you on this

> 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!
>

i would expect to significantly increase stability from this, i look forward 
to it....
Hamish
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