Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

> 
> 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, 

You can enhance quill. It already does a good job building spells.
There have been scripts written to update spells, yet no one used them or
enhanced them, if everyone is complacent about it, nothing will get done.
So, do it. Automatic spell updates arent hard, and as we grow in spells
less and less work should be done manually.

> etc. Two, I'd waant 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.

Assuming Thomas is voted in as security lead then Seth can run for QA
team lead, and assuming he gets voted in, then he would presumably be
working on prometheus (since I obviously couldnt continue work on it
and sorcery simultaneously).

Combining prometheus with the auto spell update is something ive tossed
around, a script could traverse the grimoire and queue up version updates,
another script could apply those updates to spells then prometheus
could cast them, if they work promote them to a repository branch of
pre-tested updates.

Of course none of that is going to program itself.

-Andrew


-- 
__________________________________________________________________________
|Andrew D. Stitt                           | astitt at sourcemage.org    |
|irc: afrayedknot                          | afrayedknot at t.armory.com |
|aim: thefrayedknot or iteratorplusplus    | acedit at armory.com        |
|Sorcery Team Lead                         | ftp://t.armory.com/         |
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