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  • From: "Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Alphabetic grimoire; was: alternative grimoire layout
  • Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:09:08 -0400

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.




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