Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

Am Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:25:59 +0100 (CET)
schrieb Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik <ruskie AT codemages.net>: 

> I still see some people not using castfs. I'd like to know why? And I'd
> like to RFC if people think it would be good to make this a required
> dependency now.

My thoughts about castfs:

1. It's a good idea, basically. In fact, intercepting the install
routines of spells in a reliable way like that is a prerequisite to be
taken serious for a source distro, IMHO.

2. I wonder what it's state is... I have the fear that it's
bitrotting... dmlb2000 isn't around, is he?

3. It should do more. We really need combined castfs, one fs overlay
that casting of multiple spells takes place in. Merging of the changes
in the castfs to the system at the user's leisure, minimizing possible
downtime because some stuff needs to be updated together. Also, are we
serious with dispelling kdelibs before casting kdelibs? That's serious
breakage and downtime while building large chunks of software. Dispels
should happen in the castfs only, not affecting the real system,
generally, and especially in such a case where a dispel is done before
a cast suceeds. Similar (and even worse considering build times) would
be the situation with gcc update, leaving g++ and gfortran broken for
some time, but that is managed with the merged gcc spell nowadays.

4. I would like to have time to help improving it (along with fixing
the user account stuff of SMGL), but I dont. There are other projects
in the queue.

5. I would be OK with offering choice between castfs for file tracking
or no file tracking at all. The latter option is still needed to
bootstrap SMGL on some syste that may lack support for castfs. For that
purpose, though, we cannot drop INSTALL_ROOT ... but possibly it's
needed anyway for stuff like installing in another prefix without
chroot intentions.


My 5 cents,

Thomas.

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