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sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] minimize global effects in CONFIGURE and DEPENDS (Was: Using dialog for the net-conf spell)

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  • From: Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>
  • To: Matthew Clark <MatthewClark AT InLesserTerms.net>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] minimize global effects in CONFIGURE and DEPENDS (Was: Using dialog for the net-conf spell)
  • Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:33:12 -0700

Matthew Clark wrote:
I recently began trying to improve the net-tools spell by replacing that
long list of questions with a dialog.

This breaks prometheus' ability to fuzz options easily. Is there a way to make your changes optional? I think rather than fixing this problem for one spell we should discuss the CONFIGURE (and DEPENDS) formats in the context of allowing alternative prompts and even the ability to use a make-menuconfig-style menu.

In short, I'm saying hold off on making this change until we can do it right. Either that, or I need a way to have prometheus have your spell in a blacklist and testing will be very ineffective since it won't be able to fuzz.

For example, we could require CONFIGURE (and DEPENDS) to make no global (non-local) changes and parse it by executing it with alternative implementations of config_query* that don't prompt in sequence. It could list all prompts, and refresh the list when you say y or n to each thing. All global operations can even be done at the end with a flag such as a "FINALIZED" variable defined that would only be run on the last run of CONFIGURE or DEPENDS.

if [[ -n $FINALIZED ]]; then
global operations here
fi

I can write a lint-checker to spot problems if we do decide to go ahead with a concept like this.

We also need a way to specify to prometheus the format of free-form fields (such as with a regular expression) the valid entries. A regular expression language generator could be made to fill in those fields. I propose we stick with very basic (posix or extended, but not pcre) regular expressions to make the generator easy to implement.

Seth

--
Seth Alan Woolley
Software Engineer
Accelerating Time to Results(TM) with Clustered Storage

www.panasas.com
swoolley AT panasas.com
510-608-4382




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