Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT optimaltec.com>]

Quoting Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>:

> On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 10:32:15AM -0400, Sergey A. Lipnevich wrote:
> > These things just create more work but little gain for users. I'm
> > against this.
>
> The point is, any cvs version is unsupported by us unless it checks out
> a specific version/tag.
> But there are several projects that release a version every other
> millenium while the cvs version usually builds and works fine (ffmpeg,
> mplayer), so the user should have a choice of using it. And while we're
> at ffmpeg and mplayer, both of those only make real sense if you use
> auto-updating as they _have_ to be checked out at roughly the same time
> to work correctly together.

Do FORCE_DOWNLOAD=on and ask users to do "cast -c ffmpeg mplayer" 
whenever they
feel like playing Russian roulette again. You're giving them choice without
losing control over their boxes. You also reduce traffic by doing incremental
update instead of full checkout.

> I'm not saying we should have many of those spells, but there are cases
> where they make sense. I only provide cvs version for very few video
> spells because I _use_ those cvs versions and maintain the spells to
> work with them, so I can as well make them available for users.

I am not against latest source, I'm against uncontrollable and unsupportable
automatic daily updates. I created many "latest source" spells myself, so
you're preaching to the choir here.