Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Apr 05, Arwed von Merkatz [v.merkatz AT gmx.net] wrote:
> The one drawback I see with this solution is that we lose the option to 
> browse
> the grimoire easily with the shell/filemanagers, but a fast keyword search
> makes up for that.

A rant first, then an actual proposal for a solution...

<rant>
As I said in IRC, I do not see this as a minor problem or an acceptable
solution.  I cannot even count the number of these "it's no big deal to
take away the filesystem tools and make people use our own tools"
conversations I've seen over the years.  There are always good reasons for
the tools approach, it offers something the filesystem approach doesn't,
but always at the cost of breaking the most common interface everyone
knows.  Linus has a great quote on why dropping the Unix file+standard file
tools approach is always a bad idea but I can't find it at the moment.

Inevitably the tools approach wins because the people suggesting it are
very familiar with their own system and don't much remember what it's like
to be a newbie in that environment or to deal with the bar to entry.  And
then this always does result in fewer users, because users who are already
switching distros want to have to relearn as few things as possible, just
for practical reasons.  The project in question either realizes this and
backtracks or just goes on without realizing the potential it had.

A somewhat recent example of this is subversion, which started out all
about using "the best tools", with a bdb-only backend and webdav-only
repository access.  There were plenty of requests early on for more simple
access, but the devs always responded that "it's easy to use bdb tools, and
databases are fast!" and "webdav lets us do so much more stuff and
everything will use it soon anyway!".  So they lost users, and kept losing
users, and eventually added other backends (including fsfs) and access
methods (including local and ssh).  And now major projects that have been
content with CVS (svn's target audience) are finally making a move to use
subversion instead.

A primary reason I decided to switch to sourcemage was because it didn't
seem to be on a kick of adding all its own tools except where they were
needed for core functionality.  This goes completely the other direction.
</rant>

Anyway, I understand totally the goal to make it easier for maintainers to
maintain the small group of spells they use, though I agree with others
that this will mostly result in several people that want to maintain the
same core spells with other spells that only have some users sitting around
in unmaintained.  It will also result in a lot of turnover, since changing
maintainers means moving the spell, not just updating a file entry.

But there are still a couple of ways to achieve it along with the best of
what we have now:

1) As already suggested, continue to sort the grimoire by a taxonomy, but
   add a MAINTAINER back to individual spells.  The section maintainer wins
   if the spell doesn't have one, but if the spell has one it wins.  Then
   go a step farther and create some guru-tools that make it easy for
   maintainers to grab just their own spells into a work area and go from
   there.  This is the right place for new tools, stuff that just
   maintainers have to worry about.  This avoids the turnover problem as
   well and is probably the right way to do it if we can figure out what
   tools we need for the maintainers.

OR

2) We could go ahead and sort the grimoire by maintainer, but do it like
   this:

   jeremy_blosser/mail-daemons/
   jeremy_blosser/mail-clients/
   jeremy_blosser/shell-utils/

   So each maintainer has their own area, but under that area it's still
   sorted a globally-defined way.  People who maintain a ton of spells are
   going to want that kind of organization eventually anyway.

   Then we add an extra layer of logic to the tarball-building scripts or
   sorcery so that when users grab grimoires or web indexes are created,
   the maintainer part of the path gets stripped.  They still just end up
   with mail-daemons/, shell-utils/, etc.  If we needed we could have
   scripts stuff the maintainer path info back into each spell as a
   MAINTAINER variable as well so userspace can tell who maintains what.
   Regardless, the point is that the maintainer-based sectioning is *only*
   useful to maintainers and the backends, and is directly *not* useful to
   users, so it should only be visible to maintainers and the backend.
   That requires some work, but we're clever people here.  Again, this is
   the right kind of place to spend the time creating new tools.  This
   would still have a lot of turnover, though.

Neither of these precludes adding KEYWORDS and improving gaze's search
abilities as well.  Of course the completely messianic way of doing this
would be to store things by something like maintainer only and then let
each user set their own sorting taxonomy based on keywords and have sorcery
automatically sort their local copy of the grimoires this way, but I doubt
any of us are that insane.

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