Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 09:17:07AM +0300, Juuso Alasuutari wrote:
> On Friday 18 August 2006 09:17, Paul Mahon wrote:
> > It is not documented to work like that and isn't supposed to. It's more
> > than likely a bug cause by something not being quoted as it should,
> > which means that you'll get inconsistent results... ie the depends
> > information could say it depends on a spell called "glibc gcc" while
> > cast may turn that into two spells, cleanse may not which would cause
> > all sorts of weirdness.
> 
> I'll test to see what happens in those cases. A bug or not, it's 
> nevertheless 
> something I think we should support.

No, its not something we support or intended. The documentation says "spell
or provider name". "name" is singular. Spell names are not allowed to
have spaces, doing so will give you undefined behavior. That it resembles
something you might want in some cases is purely coincidence, it very
well could have just run rm -rf / instead.

So, it is not an undocumented feature, and I dont see why we should so
hastily assume its something sorcery should support. This could easily be
done with a wrapper function. In fact, if it was something we add in
sorcery, in order to use it, you'd have to add a wrapper in libcompat
for users of stable sorcery. Seth also brings up a good point, which is
that the policy of what this means isn't quite clear.

Philosophically speaking, I think that its better to keep the interface
to sorcery simple rather than overload it with all sorts of extra
convenience and policy setting interfaces. If theres something that
*can't* be done outside of sorcery, then it should go inside, but if
it can just as easily be done with an existing api, then I really don't
see a point. In the end I think it works out better for both of us.

-Andrew


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| Andrew D. Stitt  | acedit at armory.com    | astitt at sourcemage.org | 
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