Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

As some of you may have noticed already, the stage-root sorcery project
has been merged with devel sorcery.

First, I'd like to extend a virtual round of applause for David Brown
(dmlb2000) for the countless hours of hard work he put into this
project. Thank you David!

Now onto some more technical notes and information.

What this means if you're a user:

Unless you updated installwatch to installwatch7 from the stage-root
grimoire, you shouldn't notice any significant change in sorcery
functionality. If you do, then please let us know asap.

After the next stable grimoire release the installwatch spell in test
grimoire will be updated to version 7. Cast will then automatically use
it for staging functionality. You'll notice that casting appears to
proceed as normal, except that during the INSTALL phase files aren't
actually being installed to the main system. Then after the "INSTALL"
phase is complete, you'll see sorcery copying files itself. Sorcery will
take special care not to overwrite any modified configuration files. Those
modified config files get places in a secondary stage. You may then,
at your leisure, use a new tool called 'confmeld' to deploy those files
to your system.

Along with the installwatch7 integration to test, there will be another
stable sorcery release. This release will incorporate changes for
forwards compatibility with installwatch7 without staging. The changes
are already in test. I need some volunteers to install test sorcery and
installwatch7 and ensure they do work properly. I've done this on one
of my machines already, but I'd like a little more confidence before
calling it stable. Any help would be appreciated.

Please do not hesitate to file bugs :-)

What this means if you work on spells:

Staged installing is on by default for all api2 spells. Api1 does not
and will not support staged installing. For the vast majority of spells
it should not be disabled. glibc and ncurses have explicitly disabled
because they have special installation requirements. It would certainly
be possible to have their fancy installation steps work with stage-root,
but I leave that decision up to the grimoire folks.

To disable staged installing, add "STAGED_INSTALL=off" to the
spell. However, please consult with the sorcery team before doing this
(file a bug). If theres a spell that does not work with stage-root, we
definitly need to know, otherwise more spells are sure to be bitten. We
want this feature to work universally.

You may override the default staged installation process in
POST_INSTALL. The exact details of how this will be done haven't yet
been determined, but thats the idea. You can also freely modify the
files in the stage during this file's execution before the staged-install
is done. So for example you could append '-x.y.z' to all the binary file
names in order to allow parallel installation.

install_config_files behavior has changed. It becomes simply a 'cp'
when stage-root is enabled. Installwatch will of course put the file
in the stage. Later during the staged installation, sorcery will run
it on all files matching the 'configs' filters (the union of sorcery,
grimoire, section, and spell filter files as normal). As stated above,
modified files end up in a secondary stage. You'll still want to leave
install_config_files in the grimoire until stage-root makes it to
stable sorcery. But basically sorcery is going to do it automatically
for you on every config file from here on out.

As you might have gathered, theres a number of new possibilities open
to us now.

Enjoy.

-Andrew

--
_________________________________________________________________________
| Andrew D. Stitt  | acedit at armory.com    | astitt at sourcemage.org | 
| irc: afrayedknot | Sorcery Team Lead       |      ftp://t.armory.com/ |
| 1024D/D39B096C   | 76E4 728A 04EE 62B2 A09A 96D7 4D9E 239B D39B 096C  |
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