Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>]

Andrew wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 04:33:12PM -0700, Seth Woolley wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>
> You can override the dialog tool within prometheus' environment such
> that it returns randomized answers. You dont actually have to use expect
> on top for everything.   When I started on it, that was a problem I didnt
> think was important to solve. What happens now is it breaks dialog and
> so the defaults get chosen whenever theres a menu. 

That's the precise problem I wanted to solve, plus we can add additional 
non-serial interfaces such as the dialog-based config grimoire-wide with 
minimal effort.

I've thrown around the idea of having it grok multi-select-style dialog 
boxes and throw a random config at it, which is what I will do when 
everything else works in prometheus and I don't have something akin to 
my proposal.

> Its not a huge deal
> so long as the spell understands that dialog exited immediatly and goes
> with defaults.

Which may be a problem, in itself, but also minor -- prometheus can be 
made to understand this failure (which could happen in a user 
environment as well).

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

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