Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

Hi everyone.

We have quite some spells that support multiple versions based on a user
choice. Right now basically all of them behave differently. I'd like to
have a unified behaviour so the user always knows what to expect.

First of all: If any other spell depends on a specific version of spell
A then spell A _must not_ allow other versions. This means that the
current apr/apr-util spells are broken as the apache2 spell requires the
0.9.x versions of them. In such cases the different versions should be
provided by seperate spells, see ffmpeg/ffmpeg-cvs for another example
where this is required.

Now for the actual versioned spell. The essential differences between
the spells we currently have:
- some spells default to stable version, some to cvs version
- some spells set VERSION=$(date +%Y%m%d), other set VERSION=HEAD, i.e.
  some auto update everytime you run sorcery queue, others don't

What I'd like to see:
- spell asks which version to use, always defaulting to the stable
  version
- spell asks if it should automatically update everytime sorcery
  queue/system-update is run (only for cvs/svn/... versions)
All questions asked in PREPARE, dependency on the vcs added depending on
the choice.

If the spell is not set to automatically update, VERSION should be set
to a constant string (e.g. HEAD, TRUNK). If the spell is set to
automatically update VERSION should be set to $(date +%Y%m%d). This will
lead to a new cache tarball every time the spell is updated which is
intentional. If an automatic update broke something, the user can dispel
-d to a previous version.

If people agree with this I'll add it to the guru handbook and every
mult-version spell not working according to this method will be
considered a bug.

Questions? Suggestions? Flames?

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org