Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Andrew \"ruskie\" Levstik" <ruskie AT mages.ath.cx>]

OK I've been giving this some thought.
And some ppl belive that using date for both autoupdating and non-auto
updating spells is a good idea. Well here are my arguments against it.

First of there was the argument of seeing what cvs checkout you used on
if you use a date tag that's redundant as one has a gaze installed foo
for that.

Second an example spell(ignore the obvious errors):

spell=bar
if cvs is true do
  if auto is true do
     version=date
     force_download=on
  else
     version=date
  fi
  source_url=cvs
fi

Ok this would produce the following result on updating the spell as
automaticaly:
produces a cache tarball with bar-date installs a spell bar-date
this is expected behaviour. And if someone issues a
cast bar the next day the will reive a bar-date+1 cache and spell
with the update info.
Also expected.
And you do a sorcery system-update and you see said spell in the list.
Also expected

But now take the non-automatic updating with these values and you get:
produces a cache tarball with bar-date and installs a spell bar-date
ok expected behaviour now here's where it get's in the range of insanity:
you do cast bar the next day and it rebuilds the exact same thing
only it installs it under the date+1 version
which imho isn't what the user wants in this situation.
And you do a sorcery system-update and you see said spell in the list
even though it's said not to automaticaly update it.
This is not imho what the user expects from a no-autoupdate option.

Ok here's the same spell using some tag or some such:

spell=bar
if cvs is true do
  if auto is true do
     version=date
     force_download=on
  else
     version=cvs
  fi
  source_url=cvs
fi

Now with the automatic updating we get the desired behaviour.
But what do we get with the non-automatic. Well
the spell does not generate unnecessary cache tarballs for one thing
the other it does not show up on every sorcery system-update.

Now some argument that using sorcery hold foo would wrk for this or
that one can easily remove said spell from an install queue and so on.
Now another suggestion was turn of generation of cache file for these
spells. But I do want the cache files. Just not for each day I updated.
Now some will argument that cleanse --sweep will clean the old ones out.
That's nice but there's a flaw in that logic. It will also remove some
caches I'd like to keep around.

I find these arguments void sice they represent an inconvinence to the user.

If someone can find me one solid reason why this should use date in both
auto and nonauto then please let me know so I can stop wasting my time and
your's by argumenting this.

-- 
Andrew "ruskie" Levstik
Source Mage GNU/Linux Games grimoire guru

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