Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>]

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