Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT sourcemage.org>]

All,

I was going to reply with lots of negative remarks to the entire 
"layout" thread, but thought better. Here's my suggestion: organize the 
spells alphabetically by the first letter of their name, with spells 
starting from digits forbidden. So, we'll have sections a, b, c, ..., z; 
no capital letters.
It's not personalized, which is good (I find the entire discussion about 
going back to explicit maintainers pointless). It's not requiring 
changes in sorcery, also good. It makes known spells trivial to find, 
which is good for maintainers. It's very straightforward and easy to 
understand, yet another advantage.
Finally, the advantage is that we can stop wasting energy on that subject.

As a maintainer, I would benefit from two sorts of tools. First, I'd 
benefit from a tool which updates the spell automatically. Second, I 
would benefit from the tool which would tell me what spells need 
updating. I would like to see a local program similar to a 
distrowatch.com's chart with versions out of sync marked as such, and 
with an additional button: a button that says "update to new version and 
cast". This would make updates very easy and allow more people to test them.
Two more tools would further improve maintainers' lives and make this 
role more approachable for users. One, creation of new spells. Not what 
we have today, but a tool that understands Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, 
autoconf-less spells with their standard install mechanism; the tool 
that after casting finds out about all dependencies and updates DEPENDS, 
etc. Two, I'd want the test farm back with prometheus running. Maybe 
with an option to run in chroot so regular users with spare CPU cycles 
could do the testing without hosing their system. Something like a 
prometheus-screensaver. Harmless but useful.

Which of these problems is better served by a grimoire layout change? I 
thought so.

Sergey.