Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 05:48:55PM -0400, Sergey A. Lipnevich wrote:
> Quoting Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>:
> 
> > Sorcery has little to do with this. Please ellaborate on what sorcery
> > would be doing with this freshmeat library.
> 
> The autoupdater of spells, if it's ever created, has to rely on sorcery 
> at least
> for the following functions: locate spells, summon and checksum the 
> source.

Both of these are already provided by sorcery, their existence is not
a valid reason to incorporate unrelated code for a specific
feature that is technically independent of sorcery. If you removed
sorcery and replaced it with something else you could still do the same
things provided that there was a tool for testing packages and a tool
for manipulating packages.

Quill already uses some sorcery functions and that is fine so long as it
stays documented.

> The
> new functionality abstracted from Quill would be: (a) find out the new spell
> version and (b) update spell. Since spells that are listed on Freshmeat are
> dispersed throughout multiple grimoires, the single code base that services
> them all and therefore is a good place to keep functions (a) and (b) would 
> be
> sorcery. 

Sorcery is really not a dumping ground for functions. Sorcery is a tool
for running spells as they stand and manipulating the results from running
them. As ruskie stated, quill is home to things related to manipulating
the content of spells. I'd like to keep sorcery from being bloated with
functions used by external tools, I have enough on my hands already.


> This functionality would then be used by Quill, autoupdater 
> script (if
> created), and maybe Prometheus. 

The autoupdater is simply a script that uses both quill and
prometheus. Quill being capable of performing the spell modifications
and prometheus being capable of testing them.

> In the future, we could also rely on
> Sourceforge.net to find out about new versions, or use RSS feeds from 
> package
> authors' pages. Those functions would become plug-ins for functions (a) and
> (b).

If you would like to research getting update info from sourceforge be my 
guest, their rss is a bit lacking at the moment so I gave up.

> 
> It really doesn't matter where those functions are as long as they're 
> maintained
> and reused without duplication, but sorcery seems to be the most logical 
> place
> for them right now.

Agreed. Im trying to avoid excessive code bloat in sorcery that would
only be used by an extremely small group (the autoupdate servers).
The vast majority of people don't need that code. Obviously a random user
does not need a library for downloading xml from freshmeat and gathering
data from it so it can be used with a tool they dont even have installed.

-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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